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53 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 









MISTRAL. 



AN EMBASSY 
TO PROVENCE 



BY 



THOMAS A. JANVIER 

s6ci d6u felibrige 




*>»i»**fe!^t^&«^ 



NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 
1893 



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jf/yoV 



r-^ XL '-l. . ^ —J 



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Copyright, 1893, by 
The Century Co. 



THE DE VINNE PRESS. 



TO 

C. A. J. 



THE NEW TROUBADOURS 

(AVIGNON, 1879) 

They said that all the troubadours had flown, — 
No bird to flash a wing or swell a throat ! 
But as we journeyed down the rushing Rhone 
To Avignon, what joyful note on note 

Burst forth beneath thy shadow, O Ventour! 

Whose eastward forehead takes the dawn divine: 
Ah, dear Provence ! ah, happy troubadour. 
And that sweet, mellow, antique song of thine ! 

First Roumanille, the leader of the choir. 

Then graceful Matthieu, tender, sighing, glowing. 
Then Wyse all fancy, Aubanel all fire. 

And Mistral, mighty as the north-wind's blowing; 
And youthful Gras, and lo ! among the rest 
A mother-bird who sang above her nest. 

Richard Watson Gilder. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 



PART FIRST 



H 



AD we not gone roundabout through de- 
vious ways in Languedoc — being thereto 
beguiled by the flesh-pots of Colhas, and the 
charms of the ducal city of Uzes, and a proper 
desire to look upon the Pont du Gard, and a 
loneine for the shade of an illusive forest — 
we might have made the journey from Nimes 
to Avignon not in a week, but in a single day. 
Had we made the journey by rail, taking the 
noon express, we could have covered the dis- 
tance in three minutes less than a single hour. 
The railroad, of course, was out of the ques- 
tion. Geoffroi Rudel, even in the fever of his 
longing to take ship for Tripoli, and there 
breathe out his life and love together at his 



2 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

lady's feet, never would have consented to 
travel from Bordeaux to Cette by the rapide. 
To me, a troubadour's representative, the ac- 
credited Ambassador of an American poet to 
his friends and fellows of Provence, the rapide 
equally was impossible. Strictly, the nice pro- 
prieties of the case required that I should go 
upon my embassy on horseback or on foot. 
Consideration for the Ambassadress, however, 
forbade walking; and the only horses for hire 
in Nimes were round little ponies of the Ca- 
margue, not nearly up to my weight — smaller, 
even, than El Chico Alazan : whose size, in 
relation to my size, was wont to excite derisive 
comment among my friends in Mexico. The 
outcome of it all was that — compromising be- 
tween the twelfth and the nineteenth centu- 
ries — we decided to drive. 

By a friend in whom we had every confi- 
dence, we were commended to an honest liv- 
ery-man, one Noe Mourgue. It was ten in 
the morninof when we went to the stables. 
Outside the door a lithe young fellow — a Cata- 
lonian, with crisp black hair, a jaunty black 
mustache, and daredevil black eyes — was 
rubbing down a horse. To him we applied 
ourselves. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 3 

''M'sleu' Noe is absent upon an affair," the 
Catalan replied. ''He is a witness at the Pa- 
lais de Justice. It is most provoking. I]ut he 
surely will return at noon. That is of neces- 
sity — it is his breakfast hour. Even a court 
of justice is not so barbarous as to keep a man 
from his breakfast. Is it not so ? " 

We looked at carriaires in the remise — it 
all was delightfully like Yorick, and the 
''desobligeant," and Monsieur Dessein — but 
found nothing to serve our turn. The Cata- 
lan cheered us with the assurance that pre- 
cisely what we wanted would come in that 
very night. At the moment, he explained, 
a commercial gent had it upon the road. It 
was a carriage of one seat, with a hood which 
could be raised or lowered, and in the rear 
was a locker wherein m'sieu'-madame could 
carry their samples with great convenience. 
It was in constant request among commercial 
folk, this carriage — not because of its elegance, 
but because of its comfort: it ran so smoothly 
that driving in it was like a dream! 

A little after noon we returned to the sta- 
bles. The Catalan had vanished, and the 
only live thing visible was a very old dog 
asleep on a truss of straw in the sun. The 



4 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

dog slowly roused himself, and gave an aged 
bark or two without rising from his place ; 
whereupon a woman came down the spiral 
stair from the dwelling-place above. She was 
in a fine state of indignation, and replied to 
our question as to the whereabouts of the 
proprietor hotly. "The breakfast of M'sieu' 
Noe is waiting for him," she said. "It has 
been waiting for more than a quarter of an 
hour. If he delays another instant the whole 
of it will perish ! What are these judges 
thinking of that they keep an honest man 
from his breakfast? It is an outrage! It is 
a crime ! " 

Even as she thus wrathfully delivered her- 
self, Noe returned; but with so harried and 
hungry a look that 't was plain this was no 
time to make a bargain with him. We as- 
sured him that our matter did not press ; 
bade him eat his breakfast in peace, and to 
take his time over it ; and to come to us, 
when it was ended, at our hotel — the Cheval 
Blanc. 

When he presented himself, a couple of 
hours later, he was in the most amiable of 
moods, and our bargain was struck briskly. 
Provided, he said, that we took the horse and 



AN EMBASSY TO TRUVENCE 5 

carriage for not less than a week — here 1 in- 
terpolated that we should want it for a con- 
siderably longer period — we should ha\e it 
for six francs a day; and, also, monsieur was 
to pay for the food of the horse. Nothing 
could be more reasonable than these terms. 
We accepted them without more words. 

'' i\nd what sort of a horse does monsieur 
require ? " 

Monsieur replied that he required simpl)- 
a good average horse; neither a sheep, nor 
yet a wild bull. 

"Ah, the Ponette is precisely the animal 
suited to monsieur's needs. She is a brave 
beast! Perhaps monsieur will not think her 
handsome, but he will acknowledge her 
worth — for she is wonderful to go! He must 
not hurry her. She is of a resolute disposi- 
tion, and prefers to do her work in her own 
way. But if monsieur will give her her lu-ad, 
she will accomplish mar\els — lortw e\en 
fifty, kilometers in a single da\'." And as 
to the carriaee, Monsieur Noe declared 
briefly that it was fit for the Pope. 

The excellent Noe, be it remembered, 
came to us fresh from the Palais de Justice, 
and the strain of delivering- himsL-h under 



6 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

oath. We caught his veracity, as it were, 
on the rebound. There was truth in his 
statement, but the percentage of this element 
was not high. The Ponette, stocky, stoHd, 
did have a considerable amount of dull en- 
durance ; but she was very much lazier than 
she was long. The carriage did run easily, 
for its springs were relaxed with age ; but it 
was quite the shabbiest carriage that I ever 
saw. 

In truth, when this odd outfit came to the 
door of the Cheval Blanc, the next morning, 
I had grave doubts as to the propriety of 
making use of it. Had the matter concerned 
myself alone, I should not have hesitated so 
much as a single instant. In small affairs I 
am no stickler, being well enough content to 
dispense with forms, provided I can compass 
substantialities. My position, however, was 
not personal, but representative ; and as a 
diplomat I was especially bound to respect 
what an eminent legal writer has termed "the 
salutary but sanctionless code called the com- 
ity of nations" — being that courteous and 
friendly understanding by which each nation 
respects the laws and usages of every other, 
so far as this is possible without prejudice to 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 7 

its own Interests and rig-hts. \\\)ukl not the 
discourtesy, not to sa)- downright u n trie mil i- 
ness, of associating the Embassy with a con- 
veyance so hopelessly undignified, I asked 
myself, traverse both the spirit and the letter 
of this code? And by accepting it, would 1 
not therefore imperil the success of lU)- Mis- 
sion at its very start ? Truly, 't was as \exing 
a problem as ever an ambassador just starting 
on his travels was forced to solve. 

Fortunately, one of the troubadours of 
Nimes happened along just then, and put 
heart into me. He had come to see us ott 
upon our journey, and had brought to each 
of us, for a farewell offering, a poem in Pro- 
vencal. They were exquisite, these little; lays; 
and especially did the soul of thirteenth cen- 
tury sonor irradiate the one entitled " Uiio 
responso'' — which was addressed in what I 
am confident was purely imaginatixc rei)ly 
to a strictly non-existent " Nourado," on the 
absolutely baseless assumption that she had 
asked him, "What is Love?" I state the 
case with this handsome series ot qualit\ing 
negations because — this troubadour being a 
stout gendeman, rising sixty, most happily 
married to a charminir wife — the inlrrence 



8 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

that his verses indicated a disposition to em- 
ulate the divided allegiance of Bernard de 
Ventadour is not tenable. But that Bernard 
would have been proud to own this delicately 
phrased and gracefully turned poem will sur- 
prise no one learned in the modern poetry of 
Provence and Lanofuedoc when I add that its 
writer was Monsieur Louis Bard. 

When we had accepted gratefully his of- 
fering of lays, I opened to him my doubts in 
regard to the fitness of our equipage ; which 
doubts he resolved promptly by quoting from 
the rules laid down for the guidance of trou- 
badours (and, therefore, for the embassadors 
of troubadours) by Amanieu de Sescas, a 
recognized past-master in the arts of love 
and war. A proper troubadour, according 
to this Gascon authority of the thirteenth 
century, must have "a horse of seven years 
or more, brisk, vigorous, docile, lacking no- 
thing for the march." Monsieur Bard de- 
clared that the Ponette fulfilled these several 
conditions, excepting only that of briskness, 
to a nicety. " Take care never to wear a 
ripped garment," wrote the Sieur de Sescas ; 
*' better is it to wear one torn. The first 
shows a slovenly nature ; the second, only 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 9 

poverty." Applying this rule to the car- 
riage, Monsieur Bard pointed out that while 
the slits in the leather were many, the rips 
were insignihcantly few. And in triumphant 
conclusion he quoted: "There is no great 
merit in being w^ell dressed when one is rich ; 
but nothing pleases more, or has more the 
air of good breeding, than to be serviceably 
dressed w^hen one has not the wherewithal to 
provide fine attire." 

x-\s our friend knew^ this summing up of the 
matter fitted our case to a hair. More than 
satisfied with his reasoninor, I ordered the 
valise to be stowed in the locker (in lieu of 
the samples which the Catalan had expected 
us to carry there) ; we mounted into our 
chariot ; our poet bade us God-speed ; the 
Ponette moved forw^ard sluggishly — and the 
Embassy was under way ! 



II 



Our first intention had been to drive direct 
to Avignon ; and we did, in fact, q-o out Irom 
Nimes by the Avignon road. But there w^as 



lo AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

not the least need for hurry : the troubadours 
of Provence did not even dream that an 
American embassy was on its way to them ; 
there was no especial reason why we should 
be anywhere at any particular time. And 
out of these agreeable conditions came 
quickly our decision to drift for a while along 
the pleasant ways of Languedoc, taking such 
happiness as for our virtues should be given 
us, before we headed the lazy little Ponette 
eastward, and crossed the Rhone. 

The tiny ducal city of Uzes seemed to be 
a good objective point ; and it was the more 
alluring because on the way thither — at the 
village of Collias, on the Gardon — was an 
inn kept by one Bargeton, at which, as we 
knew by experience, an excellent breakfast 
could be obtained. It was the breakfast that 
settled matters. At St. . Gervasy we turned 
northward from the highway into a cross- 
country road, a cheinin vicinal ; passed 
through ■ the rocky garrigue region, and 
down to the river through a canon that 
seemed to have gone adrift from the Sierra 
Madre ; crossed the Gardon by a suspen- 
sion-bridge, and so came into Collias an hour 
after noon. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE u 

On a very small amount of structural capi- 
tal, the inn at Collias supports no less than 
three names. Along the end of it is painted 
in large letters " Cafe du Midi " ; along the 
front, in larQ^er letters, '^ Hotel Barecton " ; 
over the main entrance is the enticiiv-- leir- 
end '' Restaurant Parisien." Our pre\ ions 
visit had been upon a Sunday. Then the 
establishment was crowded. Now it was 
deserted. As we drove throuo-h the arched 
gateway into the courtyard the only living 
creatures in sight were a flock of chickens, 
and two white cats with black tails. All the 
doors and windows were tioht shut — for 
breakfast long since was over, and this was 
the time of day divinely set apart for sleep. 

The noise of our wheels aroused Monsieur 
Bargeton. Presently a door opened, and he 
slowly thrust forth his head and stared at us 
drowsily and doubtfully. Then, slowh', he 
withdrew his head and closed the door. 
From the fact that some minutes elapsed be- 
fore he came forth in his shirt-sleeves, we 
inferred that at his first semi-appearance his 
attire had been even less complete. 

"Yes, yes," he said, speaking in an injured 
tone, ''breakfast can be had, of course. But 



12 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

it will not be a good breakfast, and it will 
not be ready soon. The time for breakfast is 
long past. Everything must be prepared." 

Fortunately, the end was better than this 
bad beginning promised. As he unharnessed 
the Ponette and stabled her, he shook off a 
little of his slumbrous heaviness and his dis- 
position toward us grew less severe. The 
old woman whom he summoned to his coun- 
sels, from some hidden depth of the house, 
put still more heart into him. After a con- 
ference with her, while we sat on a stone 
bench beneath a tree in the courtyard, he 
came to us with a statement full of encour- 
agement. It was all right about the break- 
fast, he declared. Monsieur and madame 
should be served with an omelet and sau- 
sages and fried potatoes ; and then he came 
again to say that monsieur and madame 
should have a good cutlet and a salad ; and 
yet later, with triumph, he announced that 
there was a melon for the dessert. 

It was our fancy to have our breakfast 
served on the great stone table in the court- 
yard. Monsieur Bargeton did not approve 
of this arrangement — the table, he said, was 
only for teamsters and such common folk — 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 13 

but lie yielded the point oraccfully. Oxer 
one end of the table he spread a clean while 
cloth ; set forth a service of clean, coarse 
chinaware ; brought us very fair wine in a 
wine-cooler improvised from a watering-pot, 
and then the omelet was served, and our feast 
beo^an. 

No teamsters came to interfere with us. 
The only suggestion of one was a smart 
black wagon, on which, in gilded letters, was 
the legend : '' Entrepot de Bieres, Uzes." 
While we were breakfasting, the beer-man 
came out from the inn, hitched up his horse, 
and drove away. He seemed to be surprised 
to find us eatinor there beside his watjon — 
but he said never a word to us, and never a 
word did we say to him. The l)lack-tailc!d 
white cats breakfasted with us, tlu! boldest 
of them jumping up on the far end of the 
table, beyond the limits of the cloth, and eat- 
ing a bit of cutlet with a trul}' daint\- and 
catlike grace; and while our meal went for- 
ward a delightful old woman in a white cap 
and a blue gown made a pretext ol picking 
up sticks near by that she might gaze at us 
with a stealthy wonder. It all seemed like a 
bit out of a picture ; and when Monsieur 



14 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

Bargeton, thoroughly awake and abounding 
in friendhness, came flourishing out to us with 
the coffee, we assured him that never had a 
breakfast been more to our minds. 

Not until four o'clock — after an honest 
reckoning of eight francs and fifty centimes 
for our own and the Ponette's entertain- 
ment — did we get away; and evening was 
close upon us as we drove slowly up the hill 
whereon is the very high-bred and lovable 
little city of Uzes. 



Ill 



We had hoped that three days of absolute 
rest in Uzes would have put a trifle of spirit 
into the Ponette ; but this hope w^as not re- 
alized. She came forth from her pleasant 
pastime of eating her head off in Monsieur 
Bechard's stables in precisely the same dull, 
phlegmatic condition that she went in. It 
was impossible to force her to a faster gait 
than a slow jog-trot. Left to herself — in ac- 
cordance with her owner's fond suggestion — 
she instantly fell into a lumbering walk. But 
her loitering disposition was so well in accord 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVEiNCE 15 

with our own that wc Ibuiul little fault in hcr 
monumental slowness. There could l)e no 
greater happhiess, we thought, than thus to 
go idling along through that lo\el\- country in 
that bright weather while our hearts were as 
Hght within us as the summer da)'s were long. 

The highway leading eastward from I'zes 
served our purposes far too directl)- for us 
to follow it. A minor road — going around 
by the northeast to another road, which ran 
south to a third road, which, doubling on our 
course, ran west again — afforded a circuitous 
line of approach to the Pont du Gard that 
was much more to our likinor. NaturalK', 
after having carefully looked out this route 
upon the map, and after having decided con- 
siderately to follow it, we abandoned it for 
something that we believed to be better 
before we had gone half a dozen miles. 

Near the hamlet of Flaux we began the 
ascent of low mountains : a very desolate 
region of slate-grey rock, with here and tlicre 
patches of scrub-oak (c/iene-vcrt) growing in 
a meagre soil. Beyond Flaux, off to the 
riofht amonor the oak-bushes, wv.ni a most 
tempting road. According to tlu: map it 
was a chemin d' exploitation. Preciscl)' what 



i6 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

meaning attached to this term I did not know 
(I found out a httle later) ; but the road pos- 
sessed the obvious merit of leading directly 
across the mountain to the village of Vers, 
and thence the highway went onward to the 
Pont du Gard. Setting aside as irrelevant 
the fact that we had come out of our way for 
the express purpose of prolonging our jour- 
ney, we decided to commit ourselves to this 
doubtful pathway for the good reason that it 
was a short cut. 

We had gone but a little way along it 
when we met a carter (a treacherous person, 
whose apparent kindliness cloaked a malevo- 
lent soul) whose deliberate statement that 
the road was passable set us entirely at our 
ease. He himself had but just come from 
Vers, he said ; and he gave us careful direc- 
tions that we might not miss the way : We 
were to ascend the mountain, and to continue 
across the little plain that there was on top 
of it, until we came to a tall stone post at a 
fork in the road. This was a sign-post, but 
in the course of years the inscription upon it 
had weathered away. At this post we were 
to take the turn to the right — and then we 
would be in Vers in a twinkling. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 17 

After we left this betraying-beacon of a 
carter the road rapidly grew rougher, aiul 
the growth of scrub -oak on each side of it 
became so thick as to be almost impene- 
trable. The four or five bare little stone 
houses of Flaux were the last which we saw 
in a stretch of more than six miles. It was a 
most dismal solitude, having about it that air 
of brooding and portentous melancholy which 
I have found always in rugged regions desert 
even of little animals and birds. 

We came slowly to the plain upon the 
mountain top, and to the sign-post whereon 
there was no sign ; and there we took, as the 
perfidious carter had directed, the turning to 
the right. The road ran smoothly enough 
across the plain, but the moment that it 
tipped down-hill it became very bad indeed. 
Before we had descended a dozen rods it was 
no more than the dry bed of a mountain 
stream, cumbered with boulders and broken 
by rocky ledges of a foot high, down wliich 
the carriage went with a series of appalHng 
bumps. To turn about was impossible. On 
each side of the stream — I prefer to speak ol 
it as a stream — the scrub-oak grew in a 
thick tancrle into which the Ponette could 



i8 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

not have thrust so much as her snubby nose. 
So narrow was the watercourse that the oak- 
bushes on each side brushed against our 
wheels. We were in for it, and whether we 
wanted to or not our only course was to keep 
on bumping down the hill. In my haste, I 
then and there cursed that carter bitterly ; 
and I may add that in my subsequent leisure 
my curse has not been recalled. That he 
counted upon finding our wreck and estab- 
lishing a claim for salvage I am confident. 
He may even have been following us stealth- 
ily, waiting for the catastrophe to occur. It 
is a great satisfaction to me that his perni- 
cious project was foiled. By a series of mira- 
cles we pulled through entire ; on the lower 
reaches of the mountain the stream became 
a road again ; and as we swung clear from 
the bushes — getting at last safe sea-room off 
that desperate lee-shore — we saw the houses 
of Vers before us, not a mile away. 



IV 



Vers is a very small town, certainly not 
more than a hundred yards across, but in the 



AN EMBASSY TO i'ROVENCE 19 

course of our attempt to traverse its tanMe 
of streets — all so narrow that our carriac-e 
took up almost the entire space between the 
houses, and all leading down-lull — w c: suc- 
ceeded in getting hopelessly lost. W'c de- 
scended upon the town at about hvc in 
the afternoon ; at which peaceful hour the 
women-folk were seated before their open 
doors, in the shade of the high houses, mak- 
ing a show of knitting while the)' kept up 
a steady buzz of talk. Many of them had 
helpless babes upon their laps, and innocent 
little children were playing about their knees. 
Our passage through the town even at a 
walk would have occasioned a considerable 
disturbance of its inhabitants. Actually, we 
spread consternation among them by dash- 
ing through the narrow streets almost at a 
run. This extraordinary burst of speed on 
the part of the Ponette — the only sign of 
spirit that she manifested during our whole 
journey — was due to extraneous causes. 
Just as we entered the town a swarm of 
vicious flies settled upon her sensitive under- 
parts, biting her so savagely that they drove 
her quite wild with pain. For a moment she 
stopped, while she made ineffectual kicks at 



20 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

her own stomach ; then she darted forward, 
and all my strength was required to keep her 
off a run. The women and children shrieked 
and fled from our path ; bolting into their 
houses and, most fortunately for all of us, 
takinor their chairs in with them and so leav- 
ing us a clear course. At the little grafide 
place I took what looked like the right turn, 
but it really was a doubling upon our 
course — and in a minute more we were 
charging down the very same street again, 
scattering the crowds assembled to talk 
about the cyclone and to gaze in the direc- 
tion in which it had gone. As these peo- 
ple had their backs turned toward us, it was 
only by a miracle that they escaped alive. 
This time I took another turn from the 
grande place — grazing a young woman car- 
rying a baby as I rounded the corner ; skil- 
fully swinging the Ponette away from an 
open door that she seemed bent upon enter- 
ing ; and then forward among a fresh lot of 
women knitting and talking at their ease. 
The Ponette seemed to be quite crazed. 
Twice I succeeded in almost stopping her, 
while I tried to ask my way out of that little 
devil of a town ; and each time, in the midst 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 



21 



of the answer, she made vain kicks at hcv 
luckless stomach, and then dashed forward 
like a simoom. Had I been drivine- a ni<dit- 
mare the situation could not have been 
worse. 

A brave old man rescued us. While I 
held in the Ponette hard, he seized her 
bridle ; and when he had calmed her by 
brushing away the tormenting flies, and I 
had explained that we were lost and had 
begged him to guide us to the highway, he 
smiled gently and in a moment had led us 
out from that entanHino^ maze. The dis- 
tance to the highway proved to be less than 
two score yards — but then he knew what 
turns to take in that most marvelously 
crooked town ! 

In my gratitude I offered the old man 
money. He refused to accept it: "I cannot 
take monsieur's silver," he said politely. 
'* Already I am more than paid. In all the 
seventy years of my life here in Vers, mon- 
sieur is the very first who has been lost in my 
little town. It is most interesting. It is 
enouorh ! " 

In this position he was firm. I thanked 
him again, warmly, and we dro\e away. 



22 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

When we had gone a short distance, I looked 
back. He was standing in the middle of the 
road gazing after us. His face was wreathed 
in smiles. 



In going from Vers to the Pont du Gard, 
and thence to Remoulins, we were compelled 
to travel by the great highways ; but in go- 
ine from Remoulins to Avienon we fell once 
more into roundabout courses: taking a route 
nationale north to the village of Valliguieres, 
that thence we might go east by a cross- 
country road which traversed a forest, ac- 
cording to the map, and therefore promised 
protection from the blazing rays of the Au- 
gust sun. On the map, this Foret de Tavel 
made a fine showing. On the face of nature, 
the showing that it made was less impressive. 
In fact, when we reached it we found that we 
had come a full half-century too soon. For 
four or five miles we drove across rocky hills 
more or less covered with oak-bushes, which 
in time, no doubt, will become trees. But of 
trees actually grown, we saw in this distance 



AN EMBASSY TO rROVLLNCK 23 

precisely six. Unfortunately they were scat- 
tered at intervals of half a mile or more apart. 
They would have been more impressive, 
would better have realized our crude Ameri- 
can conception of a forest, had they been in 
a group. 

It was because of our detour in searcli of 
the shade of trees wdiich had only a carto- 
graphical existence that our coming Uj the 
hills bordering the Rhone westward was de- 
layed until late in the afternoon ; and the 
Ponette walked up the long ascent so slowly, 
and so frequently halted — with a persuasi\e 
look over her shoulder that could not be re- 
fused — that when at last we reached tlie 
crest the sun w^as hanging low on the hori- 
zon above the summits of the Cevennes. 

On the hilltop, with a sigh of thankfulness, 
the Ponette stopped ; and for a while we did 
not uro^e her to q-q forward. Below us, in 
purple twilight, lay the Rhone valley : here 
widely extended by its junction with tlie val- 
ley of the Durance. On its farther side were 
the foot-hills of the Alps, with Mont W'utour 
standing boldly forward and rising high int(^ 
the radiant upper regions of the air. Near 
at hand, down in the purple shadows, close 



24 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

beside the river, was a dark mass of houses 
and churches, sharply defined by surrounding- 
ramparts : from the midst of which a huge 
building towered to so great a height that 
all its upper portion was bathed in sunshine, 
while its upper windows, reflecting the nearly 
level sunbeams, blazed as with fire. And we 
knew that we were looking upon Avignon 
and the Palace of the Popes ; and our hearts 
were filled with a great thankfulness — be- 
cause in that moment was realized one of the 
deep longings of our lives. 

The Ponette, with the carriage pushing 
behind her, went down the zigzag road, Les 
Angles, at an astonishing trot ; but pulled up 
to her normal gentle pace on the level be- 
fore we reached the bridge, and crossed that 
structure — over which a sarcastic si^n for- 
bade her to gallop — at an easy crawl. We 
did not try to hasten her pondering footsteps, 
being well content to approach slowly this 
city of our love : seeing below us the Rhone 
tossing like a little sea ; on each side of us, 
in the central portion of the passage, the 
green darkness of the Isle Barthelasse ; off to 
the left the surviving fragment of the bridge 
built seven hundred years ago by St. Benezet 



AN EMBASSY TO l'Kc)\ KXClC 25 

of blessed memory; in front of us tlic hi-h 
houses of the cit)- risino- al)ove their encir- 
cling wall. Slowly we went onward, and in 
the dusk of early evening we entered A\ ig- 
non by the Porte de I'Oulle. 



VI 



We had intended going to a modest, low- 
priced hotel — ''un pen a I'ecart, mais recom- 
mande," as the guide-book put it — in the 
central portion of the town. The ci\ic guard 
who halted us at the gate — to request our 
assurance that our lio^ht luorcrao^e contained 
nothing upon which the octroi had a 
claim — ofave us with the o-ood will of a true 
Provengal the most precise directions as to 
how this hotel was to be reached. Having' 
thus directed us, he said frankly that we 
probably would get lost on the wa\- thither; 
but added that anybody whom we met would 
be glad to set us on our course anew. This 
warninof, and a single Mance into tlu^ lal)\- 
rinth before us, determined me against the 
adventure. After our experience in Vers — 



26 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

and Avignon was to Vers as a haystack to a 
wisp of hay — I had no fancy again to try 
conclusions with a maze ; and I was the 
more easily seduced from this dangerous en- 
deavor by finding, not a dozen rods within the 
city walls, the friendly open gateway of an inn. 

It was the Hotel de I'Europe, the most 
magnificent establishment in Avignon ; the 
hotel to which, above all others, we had de- 
cided that we would not go. Without a 
moment's hesitation I drove the hopelessly 
vulgar Ponette and our shabby carriage 
through the arched gateway and across the 
courtyard to the main entrance. The geraitt 
received us coldly; the waiters, in evening 
dress, regarded us with an open disdain. 
Even the stable-boy, called to lead the Po- 
nette to her quarters, manifested a sense of 
the indignity put upon the establishment by 
interrupting my orders as to oats with a curt, 
*' But yes, m'sieu' ; I know, I know," and 
going off with his nose ranged well in air. 

It came upon us with a shock, this show 
of scorn. In the little towns where we had 
halted during the week that our journey had 
lasted we everywhere had been well re- 
ceived. At Tavel, where we had break- 



AN EMBASSY TO I'ROVENCE 27 

fasted that very da)^ ('t was a \illa^e iIkiI 
I had hesitated about entering- in such poor 
array because of the sig-n at its outer Hniils : 
"A Tavel la mendicite est interdite") our 
host had volunteered the handsome state- 
ment that the Ponette was a brave l)east 
wdth legs of Iron ; and he had spoken in 
tones of conviction which left no room for 
doubting that his admiration for her was sin- 
cere. But at Tavel, and through the whole 
of that happy week, we had been among the 
simple children of nature ; in coming to the 
Hotel de I'Europe, as w^e now sharpl)- real- 
ized, we once more w^ere in touch with that 
highly conventionalized phase of civilization 
known arbitrarily as Society, and were 
subject to its artificial laws. 

As we were led to our gilded and red- 
velveted apartment — wath a man in waiting 
to brush the Ambassador's rusty coat, and a 
maid to brine hot water for the Ambassa- 
dress — I could not but feel a shuddering 
dread that my mission might prove a laihire 
after all ! What if the Provencal poets should 
resent — even as the operant and the waiters 
so obviously resented — the lowly state in 
which the American Embassy had come ? 



PART SFXOND 



HAVING been swayed by considerations 
partly diplomatic and partK' personal, 
the Embassy had gone from America to Pro- 
vence by a route which gave it no opportu- 
nity, so to speak, for changing cars. Diplo- 
matically, the hope was entertained that by 
thus ignoring all other nations and principali- 
ties a more favorable impression would be 
made upon the high poetic Power to which it 
was accredited. Personally, the danger was 
recognized that if the Embassy — being b)' 
nature errant — were given large opportuni- 
ties to stray, years might elapse before it 
arrived at its destination ; to say nothing ot 
the possibility that it might never get there 
at all. 

Under constraint of these convictions our 
course had been shaped. On a gre)- morn- 

29 



30 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

ing in April we had taken ship at New York, 
and had ghded out through the grey mists 
which enveloped the harbor into the grey 
waste of the Atlantic. Grey weather clung 
to us. Mist overhung the land when at last 
we sighted it, and Cape St. Vincent and 
Cape Trafalgar loomed large through a cold 
haze ; when we passed the Rock, the base 
whereof was hidden in a mass of cloud, that 
considerable excrescence upon the face of 
nature seemed to have started adrift in the 
upper regions of the air ; mist clung about 
the lower levels of the east coast of Spain, 
hiding the foundations of the snow-capped 
mountains and leaving only their gleaming 
crests defined against the cold sky ; even the 
Gulf of Lyons was chill and grey. And at 
the end of all this, in a flood of May sun- 
shine, Marseilles — in its glow and glory of 
warm color — -burst upon us like a rainbow- 
bomb. 

From Marseilles to Avignon, by the rapide, 
the journey is made in precisely two hours. 
The time consumed by the Embassy, how- 
ever, in its passage between these points was 
three months and four days. I mention this 
fact in order to exhibit in a favorable light 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 31 

our wisdom In choosing a direct route across 
the Atlantic. Had we made our landin"- 
at any port on the northern coast of Eu- 
rope, with the consequent beguihno- oppor- 
tunities for lateral travel which then would 
have opened to us, I am confident that 
even now we would be working our wa)' 
southward amidst enticing winds and lurin'^- 
currents toward our still far distant eoal. 

o 

It was only our firmness in resisting at the 
very outset all these attractive possibilities 
that in the end brought us to Avignon in 
what, I think, was a reasonably short space 
of time. 

Aside, however, from the predilection of 
the Embassy for devious rather than direct 
ways, there were large considerations of pol- 
icy which made advisable a slow advance 
from Marseilles northward. For the ade- 
quate discharge of our mission, it was very 
necessary, before presenting our credentials 
and opening official relations with the poets 
of Provence, that we should enlarge our 
knowledge of themselves, their literature, 
and their land. In truth, our lund of igno- 
rance touchincr all these matters \astl\- 
exceeded our fund of information — a lack 



32 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

of equipment for which I should be disposed 
to apologize were it not so entirely in keep- 
ing with all the traditions of American 
diplomacy. 

Our whole store of knowledge was no 
more than a mere pinch of fundamental facts : 
that about the end of the third decade of the 
present century a poet named Joseph Rou- 
manille had revived Provencal as a literary 
language ; that to this prophet had come, as 
a disciple, Frederic Mistral, who presently 
developed into a conquering and convincing 
apostle of the new poetic faith ; that to these 
two had been gathered five other poets ; that 
the seven, all dwelling in or near Avignon, 
had united — about the middle of the cen- 
tury — in founding a brotherhood of Proven- 
cal poets to which they gave the name of 
the Felibrige ; that, in the course of years, 
this brotherhood had come to be a great so- 
ciety with branches, or affiliated organiza- 
tions, in various parts of France and even in 
Spain. But of the poetry which these poets 
had written we knew nothing at first hand. 
We had not seen, even, either of the English 
versions of Mistral's ''Mireio" — the one by 
Miss Harriet W. Preston, the other by Mr. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVKNCE ;^^ 

Charles Grant. In short the cittitude of the 
Embassy toward Proven9al hterature was as 
handsomely unprejudiced as could be induced 
by a liberally extensive ignorance of essential 
facts. 



II 



On the other hand, the Embassy did pos- 
sess a considerable store of knowledge in 

o 

regard to the group of Avignon poets per- 
sonally ; and all of it tended to induce a 
prejudice of a most kindly sort. 

Eleven years before our mission was de- 
spatched, the American troubadour whom we 
represented had made a poet's pilgrimage to 
Avignon, and had been taken ('t is a way 
they have in Avignon) promptly to his brother 
poets' hearts. How unexpected and how de- 
lightful had been his experience best may be 
exhibited by a citation from the record made 
at the time by the historian to the expedi- 
tion — who thus wrote, under date of the 8th 
and loth of April, 1879: 

''We have made a great discovery — a 
'nest' of Proven9al poets, all li\ing and writ- 



34 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

ing here at Avignon. Our own poet spent 
the morning with them yesterday, and came 
home bringing an armful of their books; from 

which, last evening, H read us some of 

the translations, which are very charming. 
One of the poets is Mr. Bonaparte-Wyse, an 
Irishman and a cousin of Napoleon III. He 
makes this his home for a part of the year, 
and writes the poetry of Provence. . . . 

''We had a most interesting day yester- 
day. The little company of poets (' felibres ') 
have united in doing honor to our poet and 

H . They came, brought by Mr. Wyse, 

their interpreter, to invite us to a ' felibri- 
jado ' — a meeting, a dinner, speeches, poems, 
songs, everything delightful. We had been 
to Vaucluse for the afternoon — on our way 
home passing Mont Ventour with its snowy 
peaks, and the hills with their olive-trees and 
cypress dark against a pale golden sky. It 
was evening when we reached the hotel and 
found them all waiting for us in the little 
square dining-room. 

" Mr. Wyse presided at dinner, with 

H and the Boy beside him : H 

wearing a bunch of starry blue periwinkle, 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 35 

the flower of Provence, in her hair. Oppo- 
site to them sat M. Roumanille (founder of 
the School), with our poet beside him ; and 
for my neighbor I had M. Mathieu, the old- 
est of the poets. Two young men were on 
the other side: M. Gras and another whose 
name I do not recall. Each one has a de- 
vice and a name by which he is known 
among the ' felibres ' — one a 'cricket,' an- 
other a 'butterfly.' 

"After dinner a cup of Chateau-neuf was 
passed, and every one in turn made a speech 
and gave a toast. We were loaded to em- 
barrassment with compliments, and our own 
modest little speeches — through Mr. Wyse's 
interpretation — were transformed into flow- 
ers of sentiment. The Boy, to his delight, 
saw very near him a dish of his favorite 
sponge-cakes — of which he sometimes had 
been allowed two as a special favor and 
treat, and to which he had given the name 
of 'biffies.' Kind old M. Mathieu helped 

him to these without limit — as H and I, 

happening to look at the dish, and seeing its 
great diminishment, suddenly perceived to 
our consternation. 



36 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

''The dinner over, they led us up a dark 
old stairway into a long hall, dimly lighted, 
at one end of which a little candle-lit table 
was laid with coffee and delicious crystal-like 
cordials. The hall had been, years ago, a 
meeting-place of the Knights Templar ; and 
there were still sisfns remaininsf of a little 
chapel there, set apart. Indeed, it all was 
like a little bit of the middle ao^es. After 
we had had our coffee, they gave us their 
songs and poems : one of the younger men 
stood up while he sang a sort of troubadour 
march to battle, his voice ringing through 
the great dim hall. M. Roumanille recited 
some Christmas verses, full of fine solemn 
tones ; M. Mathieu, a little poem with the 
refrain Catoun ! Catoun ! — keeping time with 
his own airy gestures and waves of the hand 
as graceful as the lines. Mr. Wyse gave us 
some translations of Walt Whitman into Pro- 
vengal verse. Madame Roumanille, too, re- 
peated a poem for us — and our own Poet 
brought some verses which he had written at 

Vaucluse that afternoon and which H 

read in their French translation. They gave 
us some choruses. Many of their voices 
were rich and musical. Then H re- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 37 

peated for them those hnes of Keats, begin- 
ning : 

O for a draught of vintage, that hath been 
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth, 

Tasting of Flora and the country-green. 

Dance, and Proven9al song, and sun-burnt mirth ! 

and although they could not understand the 
words they felt their wonderful melody. 

" It was very late when we went home 
through the quiet streets, escorted by two or 
three of our entertainers — one of them car- 
rying the Boy. He had been safely tucked 
away in a bed at the hotel after dinner, and 
did not wake except — his head on his own 
little pillow — to say once (still dreaming of 
poets and sponge-cakes), ' 'Nuff biffies ! ' " 

Upon our troubadour's store of delightful 
memories (only a part of which are referred 
to in the foregoing citation of history) we 
had drawn so often and so freely that these 
Provengal poets had come to be to us — while 
as yet our very existence was unknown to 
them — our own familiar friends. Time and 
again we had fancied ourselves knocking at 
one or another of their doors in Avignon; 
and thereafter, as we entered, receiving the 



38 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

welcome which we knew would be given us 
so warmly because of our coming as the 
vicars of one whom they knew and loved. 

And yet, being landed at Marseilles, close 
to these friendly doors which we were sure 
would be standing wide for us the moment 
that our status as ambassadors was known, 
we deliberately chose to make our approach 
to Avignon by methods so slow and by 
courses so roundabout that we spent more 
than three months upon a journey that could 
have been made in less than three hours. 



Ill 



Our tarrying, as I have said, was the out- 
come of our intuitive perception of the re- 
quirements of diplomacy. Those whom we 
so longed to know were not mere ordinary 
men: they were poets. For us to cast our- 
selves upon them ignorant of their poetry 
would be a grave discourtesy ; almost an 
affront. Common politeness, no less than 
our own interest, commanded that we should 
?eek in their writings for that understanding 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 39 

of their tone of thought, their purposes, tlicir 
aspirations, which would enable us to meet 
them upon a common ground. And we real- 
ized that hand in hand with this study of 
their literature should go a study of their 
fellow-countrymen and of the land in which 
they lived. For which several reasons we 
perceived that the case of the Embassy was 
one that required slowness in order to assure 
speed. 

At Marseilles, in the very first book-shop 
that we entered, the very first book that we 
bought was Roumanille's "Oubreto en Vers." 
It was to Roumanille, the Capoulie, the 
head, of the Felibres, that the Embassy 
specifically was accredited. Therefore was it 
fitting that our first purchase should be the 
volume in which his first poems are in- 
cluded — the sparks of pure fire which kin- 
dled anew the flame of Provencal literature 
in modern times. 

The poems were in Provengal only. There 
was no French translation. Fortunately the 
Ambassadress — possessing an equipment ot 
Spanish, Italian, and French, together with a 
certain skill in Latin — found the conquest of 
this language easy ; and the Ambassador 



40 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE ^ 

profited by her gift of tongues to become 
acquainted with the spirit of Roumanille's 
verse. It was a most genuine poetry, and 
popular in the better sense of that injured 
word. With few exceptions, the themes 
were of a sort which country-side folk readily 
would comprehend ; commonplace subjects 
made relishing, and at the same time shifted 
wholly away from the commonplace, by deli- 
cate turns of poetic sentiment or an infusion 
of genial humor or a sharp thrust- of homely 
wit. Very many of the poems were homi- 
lies ; but so gaily or so tenderly disguised 
that each went fairly to its mark without 
arousing any of that just resentment which 
is apt to annul the benefits supposed to be 
conferred by homilies of the usual sort. It 
was easy to see in these poems how and why 
Roumanille had laid hold upon the hearts of 
his countrymen. We ourselves, though los- 
ing much of their rich flavor of local allusion, 
yielded instantly to the blending of grace, 
freshness, humor, manliness, naivete, which 
gave them so peculiarly original a charm. 

In the same book-shop we found another 
volume of poems which greatly stirred us : 
" Lou Roumancero Prouvengau " of Felix 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 41 

Gras. In our then ignorance, we barely 
knew this poet's name. But we had read 
no farther than "Lou Papo d'Avignoun " 
and ''Lou baroun de Magalouno " when our 
minds were made up that here was a singer 
of ballads whose tongue was tipped with fire. 
They whirled upon us, these ballads, and 
conquered our admiration at a blow. We 
knew by instinct — what time and greater 
knowledge have shown to be the truth — that 
of all the Provengal poets whom we soon 
were to encounter none would set our heart- 
strings more keenly a-thrilling than did this 
fiery ballad-maker, Monsieur Gras. 

It was in another book-shop, the friendly 
establishment of Monsieur Boys — a shop 
pervaded by that delightful smell of musti- 
ness which, being peculiar to old books, sets 
every bookman's soul on the alert for the 
finding of treasures — that we came upon 
Mr. Grant's unrhymed English version of 
" Mireio " ; and so were able (having already 
bought the edition in which is the author's 
parallel translation into French) to essay the 
reading of Mistral's first poem with the dou- 
ble advantage of his own French version 
and of this literal English key. 



42 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

English and Provengal, be it remarked, are 
more closely allied in genius than are Pro- 
vengal and French. They have in common 
an honest directness, a sonorous melody, a 
positive strength ; and even many almost 
identical words — for which reasons Proven- 
gal may be resolved into English with a close 
approach to literal exactness, and with little 
loss of the essence of the original phrase. 
Mr. Grant's translation of " Mireio," it must 
be confessed, is not a brilliant illustration of 
these facts ; but in Miss Preston's rhymed 
English version of the poem (at that time 
unknown to us) many felicitous passages 
show how successfully the soul and the body 
of the original may be transferred into Eng- 
lish verse. 

But these considerations of the verbal 
mechanism of translation came later. When 
we first read "Mireio" we thought only of 
the poem itself: a perfectly simple story of 
country life which Mistral's genius has ex- 
alted to the plane of the heroic ; an idyl 
which rises from height to height until it be- 
comes a tragedy ; a strain of pure melody 
throughout. Having read it- — and after it 
" Nerto," " La Reino Jano," " Calendau," and 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 43 

the exquisite shorter poems, " Lis Isclo 
d'Or" — we were at no loss to understand 
why Mistral is called Master by his brethren 
of the Felibres. 

Still another very useful book did we find 
in a Marseilles book-shop ; one, indeed, 
which so substantially increased our store of 
necessary knowledge that I desire to place 
formally on record here my gratitude to its 
author : Monsieur Paul Marieton. This 
book, '' La Terre Provengale," is a veritable 
treasury of information concerning the Fe- 
libres and all their works and ways; a blend- 
ing of kindly personal gossip — so frank and 
so confidential that those about whom the 
author writes seem fairly to rise up in the 
flesh before the reader's eyes — with a mass 
of accurate statement in regard to what these 
celebrities in the world of letters have ac- 
complished, and about the beautiful land in 
which they live. 

I did not venture to hope, while I was 
reading this book with so much satisfaction 
and also with so much profit, that in the full- 
ness of a fortunate time its genially erudite 
author would become my friend ; and I cer- 
tainly did not imagine (though this also has 



44 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

come to pass) that my life would be made a 
torment to me by receiving from Monsieur 
Marieton letters in a handwriting so bewil- 
deringly chaotic that to read them requires 
in every instance a special inspiration from 
on high ! 

And so, through the weeks and the 
months which followed our landing at Mar- 
seilles, we added constantly to our stock of 
books and to our store of literary knowledge ; 
while from various points of vantage — Mont- 
pelier, Aries, Aiguesmortes, Tarascon, Beau- 
caire, Nimes — we softly spied upon the land. 
Through all this time we found growing 
within us a stronger and yet stronger love 
for a people and a literature whereof the 
common characteristics are graciousness, and 
manliness, and absolute sincerity, and warmth 
of heart. And all was so satisfying and so 
entrancing that the three months and four 
days during which we were upon our journey 
from Marseilles to Avignon seemed to us no 
more than a single bright spring morning : 
wherefore, as we sank to rest that night 
amidst the excessive gilding and red velvet 
of the Hotel de I'Europe, we counted the 
evening of our coming to Avignon — as it 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 45 

trulv miorht have been had we eone direct 
from our ship to the train — but the evening 
of our first day in France. 



IV 



Our hearts were beating many more than 
the normal number of beats to the minute 
when we set forth to deHver to the Capouhe 
of the Fehbres the credentials of our Em- 
bassy. 

These credentials — therein following prim- 
itive Mexican customs — were wholly pictorial. 
They consisted simply of four photographs : 
of the American troubadour whom we rep- 
resented ; of his dame ; of their children ; 
of their great dog. My instructions were to 
present these empowering documents to 
Roumanille, in his official capacity as Ca- 
poulie of the Felibres, and to tell him that 
with them came the love of those to whom 
love had been given by the poets of Pro- 
vence eleven years before. And I was to add 
that in America still were cherished warm 
and grateful memories of those glad evenings 



46 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

in the old house (the abiding-place of the 
Templars in Queen Jano's time) where the 
poet Anselme Mathieu in most unbusiness- 
like fashion carried on the business of inn- 
keeping- : when the corks flew out in mellow 
cannonading from old bottles of precious 
Chateau-neuf du Pape, wine consecrate to 
the felibrien festivals ; when all the poets 
wrote poems to their brother from afar ; 
when the ancient vaulted hall of the Tem- 
plars rang with the echoes of iambic laugh- 
ter, and with the choruses of Provencal songs. 
Knowing that English was a sealed lan- 
guage to Roumanille, I ventured to add to 
my pictorial credentials some written words 
which had the appearance of being English 
verse. The sentiments embodied in these 
supposititious verses would stand translation 
into French prose creditably ; and I had the 
more confidence in their kindly reception 
because the Ambassadress had encompassed 
them with a decorative border of olive- 
branches, amidst which were blazoned the 
arms of Avignon and of our own country 
together with the emblem of the Felibres, a 
cigale. This illusive manuscript being in- 
closed in the official-looking envelop which 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 47 

contained the empowering photographs, the 
Embassy moved out In good order from Its 
too-magnificent quarters, and with a becom- 
ing dignity advanced upon Roumanille's 
book-shop In the Rue St. Agrlcol. 

From the Hotel de I'Europe to the Rue 
St. Agrlcol Is a walk of but five minutes. 
As we rounded the corner from the Rue 
Joseph Vernet, we saw our Mecca before 
us — plainly marked by a sign on which was 
the legend in tall yellow letters: " Rouma- 
nllle. Librairie Provengale." Here, together, 
Roumanllle had both his shop and his home. 
Directly across the street was the church of 
St. Agrlcol, wherein, in reverent faith, this 
good old man worshiped through so many 
years. 

The door of the shop stood open. We en- 
tered Into a bookman's paradise. The room, 
large and lofty, was packed with books from 
floor to ceiling ; books were spread out upon 
tables ; books were on nearly every chair ; 
boxes of books and piles of books encum- 
bered the floor. In the midst of this biblio- 
graphic jungle, at a desk everywhere littered 
with books and papers, sat Roumanllle him- 
self: a sturdy, thick- set man of medium 



48 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

height ; gray hair ; beard and mustache 
dipped short and grizzled almost to white ; 
fresh complexion ; kindly light-brown eyes 
twinkling humorously under bushy gray 
brows ; a racy and at the same time a very 
sweet and winning smile. 

He rose slowly, and in accepting the pack- 
age, and in listening to the message that ac- 
companied it (which message the Ambassador 
prudently delivered through the medium of 
the Ambassadress), he manifested so marked 
a hesitation as to strengthen our already 
aroused fears that the Embassy might be re- 
jected by the power to which it came. Later, 
when cordial relations were fully established, 
he explained matters. What with the ap- 
pearance of the Ambassador (who by some 
twist of atavism has reverted to the type of 
his ancestors of three hundred years ago, 
dwellers in almost this very part of France), 
and the fluent French of the Ambassadress, 
his mind was all at sea. There seemed to be 
no reasonable connection between the mes- 
sengers, who apparently were his own coun- 
try-folk, and the message that they brought 
from friends who certainly belonged in a dis- 
tant part of the world. Not until the mes- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 49 

sage had been repeated and explained a litde, 
and die opening of die package had discov- 
ered die well-known faces, was die whole 
matter clear to him. And then what a wel- 
come we received ! 

Madame Roumanille was summoned, and 
their daughters Mademoiselle Therese and 
Mademoiselle Jeanne, to take part in wel- 
coming the representatives of the friends who 
had come and gone eleven years before — 
but who were remembered as freshly and 
warmly as though their visit had been upon 
the previous day. 

From the shop we were led through the 
dining-room to the salon — a large room at 
the back of the house, facing south and 
flooded with sunshine, which gained individu- 
ality from delightful old-fashioned furniture, 
interesting pictures and curious antique bric- 
a-brac, and a Provengal tambourine and pipe 
hung upon the wall. Instantly our photo- 
graphic credentials were ranged along the 
front of the pianoforte, and the whole fam- 
ily burst forth into eager exclamations and 
questionings. 

" It is Monsieur and Madame to the very 
life ! Just as they were eleven years ago ! " 



50 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

*'And the children — how lovely they are! 
There was only one then. Can it be that it 
was this one — this tall boy? Impossible! 
He was but a baby. We gave him cakes ! " 

"And the gentle young lady who was with 
them — so quiet and so sweet. Why is not 
her photograph with these ? " 

" Heavens ! How huge a dog ! A St. 
Bernard — is it not so?" 

" Ah, if only it were not their pictures, but 
themselves ! " 

Naturally it was the elders whose talk 
was reminiscent and comparative. When the 
American troubadour came with his train to 
Avignon, Mademoiselle Therese was but a 
slip of a girl, and Mademoiselle Jeanne was 
but a baby of two years old. But we found 
a pleasant proof of how well the visit had 
been kept alive in the elders' hearts, and of 
how much it must have been talked about, in 
the fact that the little Jeanne was quite sure 
that she herself remembered it all very well ! 

No one can refuse to credit the people of 
the south of France with warm hearts. But 
it is customary with travelers of a certain 
sort — possessors of acrid souls encased in 
thin-blooded bodies — to seek an apology 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 51 

for their own genuine coldness by aspers- 
ing this genuine warmth with such terms as 
'' impulsiveness " and " emotional efferves- 
cence," and by broadly denying that its 
source is more than a momentary blaze. 
Let such as these observe that we found 
that day in Avignon still burning warmly 
and steadily a fire of friendship lighted at 
a chance meeting and fed only by half a 
dozen letters in eleven years ! 



V 



When these kindly souls in part had satis- 
fied their eager desire for news of the Ameri- 
can troubadour and of those beloneine to 
him, they diverted their interest in a hospi- 
table fashion to his ambassadors, and with a 
genuine heartiness pressed us with questions 
concerning ourselves. 

They were delighted when we told them 
that we had preferred to shun Paris, and to 
come directly from America to their own 
beautiful city of Marseilles ; and more de- 
lighted to find that our plan for a whole sum- 



52 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

mer of travel was a circuit of not much more 
than a hundred miles in Languedoc and Pro- 
vence. As to our method of traveling — in 
the shabby little carriage drawn by the infi- 
nitely lazy little mare — they set our minds at 
rest in a moment by protesting that it was 
nothing less than ideal. And then they lis- 
tened with great sympathy to the narrative 
of our small adventures by the way since our 
departure from Nimes. When we came to 
our entanglement in Vers, and the vast com- 
motion with which our cyclonic passage had 
filled that very little town, dear old Rouma- 
nille fairly held fast to his comfortably fat 
sides and lauo^hed until his cheeks were 
a-stream with tears. It was better, he 
vowed, than any farce ! 

When we touched upon the more serious 
side of our undertaking, our desire to study 
the new literature that in these latter days 
had blossomed so vigorously in Provence, 
their interest took a correspondingly serious 
turn ; and the pleasure that our purpose 
gave them obviously was deep and grave. 

Roumanille was gratified when we told him 
that his " Oubreto en Vers" was the corner- 
stone of our Provencal library ; the book that 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 53 

we had bought first of all. Speaking of it 
naturally brought to our minds the other vol- 
ume that we had bought in the same shop 
and on the same day, and in very emphatic 
terms we expressed our admiration for " Lou 
Roumancero Prouvengau," and for its author, 
Monsieur Felix Gras. Before our eulogy 
was half concluded the entire family broke 
in upon us in chorus. 

'' Moil fr ere r' from Madame. 

'' Mo7i beau-freixT' from Roumanille. 

''Mori onclef' from the eirls together. 

Mademoiselle Jeanne sprang up and 
brought us a photograph of this dear uncle. 
''Ah!" she said, "you must hear him sing 
his poems — then you will know what they 
really are ! " 

This discovery that we had in France, as 
well as in America, a common center of af- 
fection brought our hearts still more closely 
together; it was almost as though we had 
discovered — as was not impossible — a rela- 
tionship of blood. 

In truth, all this warm friendliness stirred 
me curiously. More and more the feeling 
was pressed in upon me that I was return- 
ing — after a long, long absence — to my own 



54 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

people and my own home. A like feeling 
surprised me when I first drifted across our 
southwestern border and found myself among 
the semi-Latins of Mexico ; but the feeling 
was far stronger — from the very moment of 
my landing in Marseilles — among these my 
kinsfolk of the Midi. Truly, I was of them. 
The old tie of blood was revived strenuously 
by the new tie of affection. Notwithstanding 
the two centuries of separation, in coming 
back to them I was coming home. 



VI 



In the evening of this happy day these 
new friends of ours — who already seemed to 
be such old friends — carried us with them 
to the pleasure-place dear to every soul in 
Avignon, but especially dear to the Felibres : 
the Isle de la Barthelasse. 

Through the narrow streets we walked 
together: Roumanille bubbllnof over with 
wit ; Madame abounding in kindliness ; the 
demoiselles like merry little birds. They 
apologized (quite as though it were a per- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 55 

sonal matter) because there was no moon — 
and we assured them that no apology was 
necessary ; that we were more than satisfied 
with the mellow radiance of the Provence 
stars. 

The Isle de la Barthelasse extends along- 
nearly the whole front of Avignon in the 
middle of the Rhone. From the hieh cause- 
way crossing it (and so uniting the suspen- 
sion bridges which here span the divided 
river) pathways descend to the low, wooded 
island, but little above the level of the rapid 
stream. In among the trees is a restaurant ; 
and in front of it, directly upon the river-side, 
are ranged many little semicircular booths of 
wattled cane — mere shelters aeainst the 
wind, which lie fairly open toward the water 
and have no roofs but the sky. Into one of 
these Roumanille led us — that we elders 
might have coffee and liqueurs together, 
while the demoiselles drank syrup and water 
as became their fewer years. 

It is the gayest and sweetest place for 
merry-making, this Isle de la Barthelasse, 
that ever a poet found. Our booth, and all 
the booths about us, shone bright with the 
light of candles guarded by tall, bell-shaped 



56 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

glass shades ; among the trees gleamed lan- 
terns, lighting up the winding paths. At our 
very feet was the dashing river. Half seen 
in the starlight, across the tumbling and 
swirling dark water that here and there was 
touched with gleams of reflected light, were 
the walls and the houses of the ancient city. 
There was a constant undertone of sound 
made up of the rustling of the wind in the 
branches above us, and the gay chatter of 
the river with its banks, and the gurgle and 
hissing of little breaking waves; above this 
confused murmur, there came floating to 
us across the water strains of music from a 
military band playing on the Promenade de 
rOulle ; all around us was a rattle of talk 
and a quiver of laughter ; and, as the spirit 
moved them, one or another of our light- 
hearted neighbors, or a whole group of them 
together, would burst forth into song. It 
was as though an opera had broken its bonds 
of unreality and had become real. 

In keeping with our joyous surroundings, 
Roumanille's talk was of the festivals of the 
Felibres ; and mainly of the great annual 
festival whereof the patroness is the blessed 
Sainte Estelle, whose symbol is the star of 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 57 

seven rays. On this notable occasion the 
four ofreat divisions of the oro-anization — 

o o 

corresponding with the four great dialects of 
the Langue d'Oc — are convened at one or 
another of the towns of southern France for 
the celebration of floral games ; which games 
are competitions in belles-lettres, and derive 
their name from the fact that the prize 
awarded to the victor is a o-old or silver or 
natural flower. They have come tripping 
down lightly through six centuries, these 
games, being a direct survival of trouba- 
dour times. 

At the banquet which follows the literary 
tournament, the sentiment of amity and com- 
radeship which is the corner-stone of the 
organization is emphasized by the ceremony 
of the loving-cup. Holding aloft the silver 
vessel — the gift of the Felibres of Catalonia 
to the Felibres of Provence — the Capoulie 
sings the Song of the Cup, whereof the 
words are by Mistral and the setting a ring- 
ing old Provengal air, and the chorus is taken 
up by all the joyous company ; after which 
the cup is passed from lip to lip and hand to 
hand. 

With due deference to the mystic influence 



58 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

of their star of seven rays, the Fehbres cele- 
brate each recurring seventh annual festival 
with increased dignity and splendor. Then 
great prizes are contended for ; and the win- 
ner of the chief prize wins also the right to 
name the Queen whose reign is to continue 
during the ensuing seven years. The re- 
quirements of the royal office are youth, 
beauty, and faith in the ascendancy of the 
Provence poets' star. It was at Mont- 
pelier, in 1878, that the first Queen was 
chosen : the bride of the then Capoulie, Mis- 
tral. The second. Mademoiselle Therese 
Roumanille, was chosen at Hyeres, in 1885. 
We bowed to this sovereign, as Roumanille 
spoke, in recognition of the accuracy with 
which in her case the conditions precedent 
to poetic royalty had been observed. 

But these light-hearted poets do not limit 
themselves in the matter of festivals to times 
and seasons. The joy that is within them 
may bubble up into a festival at any moment ; 
and when their spirits thus are moved, a gay 
company, presided over by seven ladies and 
by seven poets, is convened — as Boccaccio 
might have ordered it — in the pleasance of 
some grassy and well-shaded park. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 59 

" Nor is even this much of formaUty neces- 
sary," said Roumanille in conclusion. '' It is 
a festival when two or three of us, or half a 
dozen of us, are met together — as w^e are 
met together now. Behold ! Madame, here, 
is a Felibresse, and I, I am the Capoulie, the 
head of all. As for Therese, she is our 
Queen. What more would you have ? " 

And so, without knowing it — there on the 
Isle de la Barthelasse, in the midst of the 
dashing Rhone waters, in sight of the twink- 
ling lights of Avignon — we had taken part 
in our first felibrien festival ! 



PART THIRD 



NEARLY a month later, when we were 
estabhshed in Avignon for a long visit, 
we took part in another festival — this was in 
Roumanille's home — whereof the motive was 
our meeting with Felix Gras. During our 
hurried first visit of only four days, when we 
were hurtling across the Midi at the heels of 
the Ponette, Madame Roumanille's brother 
was out of town — he is a jtcge de paix, and 
his absence from Avignon was connected in 
some way with the issuing of licenses for the 
shooting season, which just then was opening. 
They are tremendous fellows for shooting, 
the men down there. Daudet has told about 
it. When lions are about, they shoot lions. 
During the close season for lions, they shoot 
hats. It is all one to them. They have the 
true feeling. What they care for is the sport. 



not the crame. 



6x 



62 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

Fortunately, when we came again to Avi- 
gnon the shooting season was well under way, 
and the magisterial duties of Monsieur Gras 
sat upon him lightly. It was arranged that 
on the second eveninor after our arrival the 
meeting which we so much desired should 
come to pass. Yet while we longed for this 
meeting we also a little dreaded it — know- 
ing, by more than one disheartening experi- 
ence, that highly idealized personalities have 
a tendency to come tumbling down from 
their pedestals when encountered in the 
flesh ; and we knew that if this particular 
idol fell he would fall a long way. In the 
interval since we had read his " Roumancero 
Prouvengau " in Marseilles, we had read his 
''Tolosa" and " Li Carbounie." With the 
reading of these poems — in which he mani- 
fests his power of sustained flight, though 
not always with the dramatic fervor of the 
shorter poems which had so entranced us — 
the pinnacle whereon we had placed him had 
grown perilously high. 

But happily, as we came to know that 
evening, our ideal had not exceeded the re- 
ality. As fine and as sympathetic as his 
poems is Felix Gras himself. The gracious- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 63 

ness of his person, his gentle nature that also 
is a most vigorously manly nature, his quick 
play of wit, his smile, his voice — all were in 
keeping with, even exceeded, what we had 
hoped to find. 

He sang to us some of his own poems — 
including, at our earnest entreaty, '' Lou 
Baroun de Magalouno" and " Lou Papo 
d'Avignoun " — set to airs which have come 
down from troubadour times : curiously vi- 
brant, haunting airs, which fell away in ca- 
dences of a most tender melancholy, and rose 
again with a passionate energy, and were 
pervaded by a melody sweet and strong. 
His singing was without accompaniment. 
Holding in his hand a copy of his ''Rou- 
mancero" (it was our own copy, and is beside 
me now as I write), he stood up in the midst 
of our little company, and thrillingly sang 
forth his verses from his heart. Roumanille, 
his hands clasped comfortably across his well- 
filled waistcoat, beat time softly to the music 
with his foot ; and when some passage es- 
pecially pleased him gave vent to his emo- 
tion — and in this also keeping the time of 
the song — in a subdued utterance com- 
pounded of a grunt and a roar. Madame 



64 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

Roumanllle, her beautiful brown eyes glis- 
tening a little, regarded her brother with an 
affectionate delight, and turned to us from 
time to time with a sympathetic smile. Mad- 
emoiselle Therese sparkled with animation ; 
and the demoiselle Jeanne — who already is 
an accomplished musician, with a rare power 
to command the presence of sweet sounds — 
listened with a rapt expression in her half- 
closed eyes. As for ourselves, it was as 
though a happy dream that we had been 
dreaminof of a sudden had come true — in the 
land of the troubadours we were hearing a 
troubadour sing his own lays ! 

We tried the good-nature of Monsieur 
Gras sorely that evening. We could not get 
enoueh of his music. We continued to de- 
mand more and more. At last Roumanille 
intervened in his brother-in-law's defense by 
bringing up from the cellar a rare old bot- 
tle of Mouscat de Maroussan — a Frontignac 
which for thirty years had communed with 
its own soul within the glass. As he care- 
fully uncorked it, and poured it in a fine 
stream into the little glasses, the long-impris- 
oned sunshine seemed to escape from its 
golden flow and fill, as did its fragrance, all 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 65 

the room. There was to me a grave dignity 
about this wine, that had kept step with me 
in the hfe journey through three quarters of 
the way upon which I had come. Doubtless 
Monsieur Gras had much the same feehng. 
But with Roumanille the case was different — 
he was twice as old as the Mouscat. For all 
of us there was feeling of a deeper sort as we 
clinked our glasses, and with our lips drank 
to each other from our hearts. It means 
much, this toast, in honest Provence. 

Already the evening was far spent. When 
we had thus pledged each other in aromatic 
sunbeams, we said good-night. What an 
evening it had been ! 



II 



During this long visit we saw Roumanille 
constantly. Our quarters — in the Hotel du 
Louvre, the old house of the Templars, where 
the poet Anselme Mathieu tried his hand at 
inn-keeping — almost adjoined the book-shop 
in the Rue St. Agricol. But a single house 
intervened. From our balcony we could 
look down upon Roumanille through the 



66 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

side-window above his desk ; we were in and 
out of the shop a dozen times a day ; we 
spent dehghtful evenings in the friendly home 
which was opened to us so freely ; Mademoi- 
selle the Queen of the Felibres was our guide 
to the sights of Avignon and the Ville Neuve. 
Our boxes of books had followed us from 
Nimes — coming by the carter, with the le- 
gend on each box, half warning, half appeal : 
" Craint V humidite'' — and Roumanille con- 
gratulated us upon the good luck that had 
attended our literary foraging. Thanks to 
the zealous assistance of my friend Andre 
Catelan, there were many treasures among 
our two or three hundred volumes. During 
our stay of two months in Nimes we had suf- 
fered few days to slip by without spending 
an hour or so with the good Catelan in his 
book-shop in the Rue Thoumayne— a little 
shop packed with books to the ceiling, and 
having in its center an island of book-cov- 
ered table around which was a channel so 
narrow that only one person could sail along 
it at a time. When, as usually was the case, 
Catelan, Madame Catelan, and 'Toinette all 
were on duty together, we were compelled to 
sweep them ahead of us in a procession as 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 6^ 

we examined the shelves. The dog, whose 
honorable name was Ex Libris, had a freer 
range — inasmuch as he could go beneath the 
island as well as around it. The kitten (a 
most energetic kitten) was freest of all — 
scampering under the island, and over its 
book-covered surface, and across the shoul- 
ders of any one of us who happened to come 
in her way. Of all the old book-shops of my 
acquaintance, none is dearer to me than this 
in the Rue Thoumayne ; and excepting only 
one in the City of Mexico — which shall be 
nameless, for I still am using it — none has 
yielded me better returns. 

As Roumanille went over our books with 
us they served as texts for his discourse. All 
of them related to the Midi, most of them 
to Provence or to Languedoc, and all of mod- 
ern date were written by men who were his 
acquaintances or friends. His commentaries 
upon them greatly increased their practical 
usefulness, giving us the personal factor — 
the author's political or religious or poetical 
bias, his reputation for care or for careless- 
ness — which enabled us to estimate accur- 
ately the value of the written words. 

Roumanille told us, too, about the begin- 



68 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

ning of his life-work, and how that work had 
gone on. It was with no thought of the far- 
reaching consequences that he began to write 
in Proven9al. His sole motive was his desire 
that his mother, to whom French was an un- 
known tongue, might be able to understand 
what he wrote. He was but a lad of seven- 
teen, a teacher in the school at Tarascon, 
when — writing in French — he first began to 
dabble in verse. One Sunday, when he was at 
home in Saint- Remy, his mother said to him : 

"Why, Jouse, they tell me that thou art 
making paper talk ! " 

" Making paper talk, mother ? " 

'' Yes, that is what they tell me. What is 
it thou art putting on the paper ? What dost 
thou make it say ? " 

" But it is nothing, mother." 

'' Oh, yes, my handsome Jouse, it is some- 
thing. Tell thy mother what it is." 

But when he recited to her his French 
verses she shook her head sorrowfully, and 
sorrowfully said to him : '' I do not under- 
stand ! " 

"And then," said Roumanille, "my heart 
rose up within me and cried : ' Write thy 
verses in the beautiful language that thy dear 
mother knows ! ' That very week I wrote 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 69 

my first poem in Provengal, ' Jeje ' ; and, be- 
ing at home again the next Sunday, I recited 
it to her. When she wept, and kissed me, 
I knew that my verses had found their way 
to her heart, and thenceforth I wrote only in 
Provengal." 

Did ever a school of poetry more beauti- 
fully begin ? 

It was in the year 1835 that "Jeje" was 
written, and immediately was published in 
a little journal of Tarascon, the '' Echo du 
Rhone." All the country-side was delighted 
by this poem in the home language ; and 
Roumanille, being thus encouraged, rapidly 
followed it with others of a like sort. At 
a stroke, he had achieved a popular success. 

But, as he continued to write — in prose 
as well as in verse — the larger possibilities 
which might flow from the revival of Proven - 
gal as a literary language presented them- 
selves to his mind. 

For centuries, while the north of France 
had been peopled by semi-savages, the south 
of France had been the home of a refined 
civilization. French literature had its birth 
here in the south. The traditions of that lit- 
erature, preserved by the troubadours, were 
not lost ; the descendants of the troubadours 



70 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

still lived ; but their songs were hushed be- 
cause the critics of the north — the ex-sav- 
ages perched upon the heights of their 
recently acquired civility — stigmatized Pro- 
vencal as a dialect unfit for literary purposes; 
as a patois. Worse than this, with their 
tacit acceptance of a foreign jurisdiction over 
their literary affairs, the people of Provence 
were tending — as were all their countrymen 
of the provinces — toward an unreserved ac- 
ceptance of Paris as a dominating center : to 
the deadening of that local love and local 
pride in which true patriotism has its strong- 
est roots. And at that particular time — the 
seething years preceding the revolution of 
1848 — the sort of doctrine, political and 
social, that was emanating from Paris was 
to the last degree subversive of the manly 
qualities which are necessary to good citi- 
zenship, and to the foundation of a stable 
state. 



Ill 



Therefore was it in the spirit of the 
prophets of old that Roumanille settled him- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 71 

self to his life-work : the awakening of a 
dormant provincial literature, and the rein- 
vigoration of a sturdy provincial manhood, 
which toQfether would constitute an effec- 
tive check upon the centralizing tendency 
whereof the object was to focus in Paris the 
whole of France. With these facts under- 
stood, it is easy to understand also why the 
press of Paris was united for so long a time 
in denouncing the purpose and in deriding 
the work of ''the patois poets"; whose me- 
lodious verse, telling not less imperiously 
than sweetly of the reawakening of that 
beautiful language in which French litera- 
ture was born, was a defiant proclamation 
of local rights as opposed to central power. 
In the broad sense of the word political, the 
literary revival in Provence has been a polit- 
ical force that already has made it^lf felt 
throughout the whole of France, and of 
which the future will have much more to 
tell. 

Having grasped the possibilities of the 
situation, Roumanille never lost sight of them 
nor ceased to work for their realization. In 
prose and in verse he delivered his homilies 
— droll stories of the country-side, quaint 



72 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

dialogues between country-folk, poems of 
country life, scintillating with a sharp wit 
which ever was mellowed with a kindly hu- 
mor, or tender with a touch of simple pathos 
that went straight to the heart; and at the 
end always whipping out some earnest truth, 
as though by accident, which made in favor 
of the honest country life and a manly mo- 
rality. They circulated wherever the Pro- 
vencal tongue was spoken, these sermons— 
in newspapers, in broad-sheets, in little vol- 
umes; and wherever they were read the seed 
which they carried presently began to grow. 
When Roumanille published his first collec- 
tion of poems, "Li Margarideto" (''The 
Daisies"), his fellow-countrymen already 
were sufficiently independent of Paris in 
their opinions to be proud of this their own 
poet who wrote in their own sweet tongue. 
Two years before "Li Margarideto " was 
published — that is to say, in the year 1845 
— a disciple was raised up to this prophet 
in the person of Frederic Mistral. He was 
literally a disciple, for Roumanille was a 
teacher and Mistral a pupil in a school at 
Avignon when the friendship was formed 
between them that was to last throughout 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 73 

their lives. Mistral, a born poet, entered 
with enthusiasm into the project for making 
Proven9al live again as a literar)- language ; 
and it was he who sounded — when, in 
1859, he published his ''Mir^io" — the first 
strong poetic note which challenged the at- 
tention of the Paris critics; and which sud- 
denly gave dignity to the whole movement 
by winning the hearty admiration of the 
critic whose opinion, still respected, at that 
time carried with it an overwhelmino- weio-ht 
of authority — Lamartine. 

But the Provengal movement, gaining force 
steadily, had assumed substantial shape five 
years before Mistral's "Mireio" appeared. 
In 1847 a fresh impetus had been given to it 
by the publication of Crousillat's first collec- 
tion of poems. In 1852 a congress of poets 
was held at Aries, whereat poems were recited 
by forty poets d'Oc — including Jasmin, Bel- 
lot, Castil- Blaze, Mouquin-Tandon, Crousillat, 
Aubanel and Mistral; which poems, with a 
striking preface by Saint- Rene Taillandier, 
were gathered into a volume that was pub- 
lished at Avignon in the same year. In 
1853 a similar assemblage was held at Aix; 
and the sixty-five poems recited at this 



74 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

g-athering were published under the title : 
" Roumavagi dei Troubaire." Finally, in 
1854, came the crystallization — when, on the 
2 1 St of May, being the feast of Sainte Estelle, 
the Felibrige, the brotherhood of Provengal 
poets, formally was founded at Fontsegugne 
by Joseph Roumanille, Frederic Mistral, 
Theodore Aubanel, Anselme Mathieu, Jean 
Brunet, Paul Giera, and Alphonse Tavan. 

They were of various estates, these seven 
poets. Roumanille (he became a publisher 
and book-dealer a year later) was a proof- 
reader in the house of the Seguins ; Mistral 
was the son of a yeoman ; Aubanel was a 
publisher — the last in Avignon to bear the 
official title of "Printer to the Pope"; Ma- 
thieu, who became an inn-keeper later, was 
a vine-grower — and so on. Over in Nimes, 
soon to become a member of the fraternity, 
was the baker Jean Reboul — to whom, being 
dead, his fellow Nimois have erected a statue 
to serve as a perpetual memorial of the glory 
which his fame reflects upon their town. It 
was a poetical democracy. The manner in 
which its members earned a livelihood was 
immaterial, for the writing of poetry was the 
real and important business of their lives. 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 75 

On these same lines the organization is 
maintained. Poetry is the first and the high- 
est consideration ; after that come the ordi- 
nary affairs of Hfe. Thus, in his off time, the 
poet FeUx Gras is a judge ; the winner of the 
first prize in the floral games of 1891 at Car- 
pentras, Monsieur Lescure, devotes his leis- 
ure to charcoal-burning ; Monsieur Huat, 
when not writing poetry, is architect to the 
city of Marseilles ; Frere Savinien, author of 
the Provengal grammar, absents himself 
occasionally from the society of the Muses, 
and attends to his minor duties as director of 
the school of the Christian Brothers at Aries 
— it is the same all down the line. Truly, 
the Felibrige is one of the very noblest fra- 
ternities in the whole world ; the single, but 
tremendous, condition of admission to the 
ranks of its membership is the possession 
of an inspired soul ! 

But underlying the poetry of these poets 
is their strong desire to foster a patriotism 
which best can be defined to American read- 
ers as a love of country based on state rights. 
The first article of the constitution of 1863 
declares: ''The Felibrige is established in 
order that Provence shall forever preserve 



^6 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

her language, her local color, her personal 
charm, her national honor, and her high rank 
of intelligence — because, just as she is, Pro- 
vence delights us. And by Provence we 
mean the whole of southern France." In the 
existing constitution (adopted in 1876) the 
wording is changed, but not the substance : 
" The Felibrige is established in order to unite 
in brotherhood, and to inspire, those men 
whose efforts are directed toward preserving 
the language of the country d'Oc." Yet it is 
in no narrow spirit that these apostles of in- 
dividuality carry on their propaganda. They 
insist upon being individual themselves, but 
they seek to encourage a like individuality in 
others. Roumanille spoke with the same 
hearty satisfaction of the spread of the feli- 
brien idea throughout France, and even 
into foreign countries, as he did of its triumph 
in Provence. 

In its organization, the Felibrige is practi- 
cal ; but in its systems of feasts, its awards of 
merit, its symbolism, it is poetical to a high 
degree. Doubtless its beautiful ritual — a 
large part of which it owes to its distin- 
guished Irish member, Mr. Bonaparte -Wyse 
— has had much to do with its practical work- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE ^-j 

ing success. In all this delicate fancifulness, 
which so vividly reflects the poetic tempera- 
ment, there is found an irresistible appeal to 
poetic souls. The brotherhood has substan- 
tial strength because flowers are its prizes, the 
passing of the loving-cup a necessary part of 
its feasts, Ste. Estelle its patroness, and its 
device her star of seven rays. 



IV 



It was during our longer stay in Avignon 
that we presented ourselves — formally, as an 
Embassy ; and very informally, as individuals 
— to Mistral at his home in the villaee of 
Maillane. Close by this village he was born, 
and here always, save for short absences, he 
has lived. 

From Avignon to Maillane the distance is 
not more than six or eight miles. We made 
it half as long again by fetching a compass 
roundabout by way of Chateau- Renard — a 
very ghost of a castle : its two tall, round 
towers, and a part of the wall which once 
stood solidly between them, rising ruinously 



y2> AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

from a mass of ruins scattered over the top of 
a stiff little conical hill. Tradition declares 
that a subterranean passage, dipping beneath 
the Durance, connects Chateau- Renard with 
the Palace of the Popes in Avignon. Mistral 
has used the legend in a thrilling fashion — 
sending his lovely Nerto flying through this 
dismal place, and making very real the fear 
that besets her as she hears the rush of the 
river above her head, and the grinding and 
pounding of the great stones which are 
whirled along the rocky bed of the stream. 
Modern engineers have had the effrontery to 
assert that the passage is impossible ; but I 
am the last person in the world who would 
set an idle engineering fiction in array against 
an established poetic fact. I do not doubt 
for a moment that the passage exists. 

Our way led across the wide valley of the 
Durance, by the suspension-bridge at Rogno- 
nas, amidst market-gardens and vineyards 
and fruit orchards. Little canals went every- 
where through the fields, that the river might 
give life to the land. Tall hedges of cypress, 
planted for protection against the strong mis- 
trals of winter, cut the landscape with long 
lines of dark green. Upon the road we 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 79 

passed flocks of sheep returning for the win- 
ter from the high pastures in the French 
Alps ; and with one of these was a sedate 
ass who carried in broad shallow panniers the 
lambs too young or too tired to walk. We 
accepted these flocks gratefully, not in the 
least doubting that they had materialized 
from ''Mireio" for our benefit. Here was 
the shepherd Alari coming down to the 
plain ; here even was the delicate touch of 
^'I'agneloun qu'es las" — the weary lamb. 
Indeed, all that country-side seemed familiar 
to us, so completely has Mistral transferred to 
his pages its every part. 

Maillane is a village bowered in trees and 
girded about with gardens. According to 
the '' Guide Joanne" it possesses three claims 
upon the attention of the public : a beau 
retable in its ancient church ; in its archives 
a parchment of the year 1400; and — the 
writer has a proper feeling for climax — "it 
counts among its 1342 inhabitants the poet 
Frederic Mistral." 

When we asked the driver of our carriage 
if he knew where to find the house of Mon- 
sieur Mistral, he looked at us with an expres- 
sion of pitying doubt — it was much as though 



8o AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

we had asked him if he knew where to look 
at noonday for the sun. His manner toward 
us had been gentle and considerate from the 
start. After that question it became quite 
fatherly. His feeling evidently was that peo- 
ple so largely ignorant required protecting 
care. 

Mistral's home is a modest dwelling of two 
stories, standing on the border of the village, 
and separated from the street by a little gar- 
den and a low stone wall surmounted by a 
railinor of iron. With a serene indifference 
to the ordinary scheme of arrangement, the 
house backs upon the street, and fronts upon 
a deep garden and the open country beyond. 
From the windows of the principal rooms — 
the library, the salon, the chambers above — 
the outlook is upon trees and flowers and 
green fields and orchards and vineyards, all 
roofed over with the blue sky of Provence. 
Nothing could be better. It is a poet's prac- 
tical way of keeping the poetry of nature 
always before his eyes. The deep, wide gar- 
den is a delight : sunny and sheltered for 
winter, with shady alleys for summer idling, 
uniting the useful with the ornamental by 
giving room to vegetables and fruit-trees, as 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 8i 

well as to shrubs and flowers, and having as 
its chief glory a great hedge of nerto — as 
myrtle is called in Provencal — which has a 
reflected glory because Mistral has bestowed 
upon his gracious heroine its musical name. 



All was still as we stopped before the 
closed iron gateway — so very still as to 
suggest the dismal possibility that the poet 
was off on one of his country walks, and 
that our coming was in vain. But our fa- 
therly driver, knowing that the front of this 
house was its back, was more confident. 
Charging me to be watchful of the horse (it 
pleased him to maintain the flattering fiction 
that this sheep-like animal was all energy 
and fire), he placed the reins in my hands, 
and then went off around the corner of the 
house with our cards. We had not brought 
a letter of introduction; but our visit, though 
no day had been set for it. was expected — 
for Roumanille had made known to Mistral 
that an American Embassy was at large in 

6 



82 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

the land, and that sooner or later it would 
present itself at Maillane. We heard the 
tinkle of a bell inside the house, then a faint 
sound of voices, then quick footsteps on the 
gravel walk — and in a moment Mistral was 
coming toward us with outstretched hands. 

What a noble-looking, poet-like poet he 
was ! Over six feet high, broad-shouldered, 
straight as an arrow, elate in carriage, vigor- 
ous — with only his grey hair, and his nearly 
white mustache and imperial, to certify to his 
fifty years. In one respect his photographic 
portraits do him injustice. His face is haughty 
in repose, and this expression is emphasized 
by his commanding presence and resolute air. 
But no one ever thinks of Mistral as haughty 
who has seen him smile. It is as frank as 
his manner, this smile ; all his face is lit up by 
the friendliness that is in his warm Provencal 
heart. 

In a flash he had us out of the carriage, 
around the house, through the wide entrance- 
hall paved with tiles and hung about with 
prints, and so. into his library — and all to an 
accompaniment of the most cordial welcoming 
talk. Roumanille had told him all about us, 
he said ; we were not strangers, we were 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 83 

friends. Heaven bless these Provengaux ! 
What a genuine hospitaHty is theirs ! 

Never did a poet have a better work-room 
than this hbrary. Overlooking the garden 
are two wide, high windows, close beside 
one of which is a writing-table of liberal 
size ; prints hang upon the walls ; the side 
opposite to the windows is filled with- a tall 
case of books. The collection of books is 
not a large one (not more than a thousand 
volumes), but it is very rich. For four 
months I had been making my own little 
collection on the same lines, and my evil 
heart was stirred with covetousness as I saw 
upon these shelves so many volumes which 
my good Catelan had told me were to be 
obtained only by some rare turn of lucky 
chance. But the book which Mistral first 
selected for us to look at was not one of these 
prizes in the literary lottery; it was a beauti- 
fully bound copy of Miss Preston's translation 
of **Mireio." Before returning it to its place 
he held it for a moment affectionately in his 
hand. 

In the same earnest strain in which Rou- 
manille had spoken, he spoke of the strong 
motives underlying the literary movement in 



84 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

Provence. There was much more in it, he 
said, than the desire to revive a beautiful lan- 
guage that had fallen into undeserved neglect. 
The soul of it was the firm purpose to array 
against centralization the love of locality, of 
home. 'Tf our movement," he continued, 
"were restricted to Provence, it might be 
regarded without injustice as the last gleam 
of a dying glory, as the last effort of a na- 
tionality about to expire. But it is not so 
restricted. Languedoc, Dauphiny, Gascony, 
Brittany are with us. And our revival ex- 
tends beyond the borders of France. In 
Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, Majorca ; in 
Italy, Hungary, Roumania, Bohemia, Flan- 
ders, even in Iceland, there is a revival of the 
ancient tongues. All this is not the work of 
chance, nor the result of the effort of a single 
group of men. It is the natural and inevi- 
table result of the realization by each of these 
widely scattered peoples that in their national 
language resides their national soul. The 
Felibrige is the legitimate and providential 
child of the epoch in which we live. 

" Here in France we have not sought 
unduly to exalt Provence or Provengal. We 
have urged our brethren of the other ancient 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 85 

tono^ues to do what we have tried to do for 
ourselves — to add to their own store of hte- 
rary treasure, to maintain their own customs, 
to preserve their own traditions ; and yet, 
while thus holdincr fast to their own individ- 
uality, to cherish as their most noble posses- 
sion their right to be a part of France."^ 



VI 



Madame Mistral joined us : a young and 
beautiful woman with a peculiarly sweet, sym- 
pathetic voice. Our talk turned to Mistral's 
work. It pleased him to find that we pos- 
sessed all of his poems, and even his "Tresor 
dou Felibrige" — his great Provengal- French 
dictionary, 2300 triple-columned folio pages, 
to the compilation of which he devoted nearly 
ten years. 

He sighed as he spoke of the dictionary, as 
well he might in memory of the labor that he 

1 " Whether we speak French or Proven9al, 't is all the same. 
We understand each other. And there is one phrase that has the 
same sound in both languages ; a phrase we all know, a heartfelt 
cry. This phrase, this cry, is — 'Vive la France! '" Speech of the 
Capoulie Felix Gras, at Carpentras, September 15, 1891. 



86 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

had expended upon it for pure love. Yet has 
this work repaid him in honor. It has placed 
him beside Littre among French men of let- 
ters, and it has won for him the formal appro- 
bation of the Institut Frangais. In recog- 
nition of its high value, the Academie des 
Inscriptions et Belles Lettres of the Institut 
aw-arded to him (March 28, 1890) the Jean 
Reynaud prize of 10,000 francs: a prize — 
given every five years ''to recompense the most 
important work produced in that period in 
studies within the compass of the Academy " 
— that is one of the highest literary honors 
(short of election to the body whence it em- 
anates) which a French man of letters can 
receive. 

Primarily, the "Tresor" is a dictionary of 
all the languages of Oc {i. e., the languages in 
which oc is the equivalent oi yes) ; but it also 
is much more than a dictionary, being, liter- 
ally, a treasury of information concerning the 
languages, the customs, the traditions of the 
south of France. It is not, as his poems are, 
the result of inspiration ; it is the product of 
a profound scholarship backed by indefati- 
gable labor extending over many years. In- 
deed, it seems impossible that the same man 
should have distinguished himself so greatly 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 87 

In such widely different ways. As M. Michel 
Breal (in presenting to Mistral the prize of 
the Academy, at Montpelier, May 25, 1890) 
well said: '*A time will come when learned 
men, finding themselves confronted by this 
enormous philological work and by Mistral's 
poems, will say that there must have been 
two Frederic Mistrals, as there were two 
Plinys — thus evading the tax upon their 
credulity involved in believing that so much 
science and so much poetry were contained 
in the same brain." 

Naturally, his poems stand nearest to the 
poet's heart. He spoke of them with a frank 
pleasure, and of the local material embodied 
in them — this being a part of his own be- 
loved country — with delight. To gratify our 
desire to associate the sound of his voice with 
his written words, he read to us, from ''La 
Reino Jano," the speech of Aufan de Siste- 
roun, in which the troubadour urges the 
Queen to leave Naples and to come to Pro- 
vence — '' cette perle royale, Vabrege^ la montre 
et le miroir du mondeJ' It was not a reading 
at random : 

Accedant en gen6ral ^ votre douce autorite, 

La chaque ville vit de son droit naturel, 

Et librement travaille, ou dort, ou chante, ou crie, 



88 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

declares the troubadour — precisely the doc- 
trine which Mistral himself had just been ad- 
vancing, of separate individual rights united 
in support of high authority. 

All this Provengal poetry gains greatly by 
being read aloud. There is music in the 
broad, sonorous sounds, and a rhythm in the 
composition so marked that frequently it is 
almost an air. Much of the verse evidently 
is written, consciously or unconsciously, to 
music. I noticed that Roumanille — writing a 
dedication in a volume that he had presented 
to the Ambassadress — beat time as he put 
the lines together in his mind ; and not until 
the measure satisfied him did he write them 
down. 

We were conscious of our privilege in hear- 
ing Mistral read his own poetry ; and this 
privilege was enlarged when he sang to us 
the '' Song of the Rowers " — as the Queen is 
borne out upon the bay of Naples in her 
barge — to an ancient thrilling air of the sort 
which had so moved us when we had listened 
to the singing of Felix Gras. I hope that 
he understood how grateful we were to him. 
King Louis of Bavaria, listening royally soli- 
tary to an opera, alone could be our parallel ! 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 89 

From his own poems we went on to speak 
of Provengal poetry generally ; of the poems 
which we had read, and of the poets whom 
we had been so fortunate as to know person- 
ally — and especially of the strong friendship 
which these men had for each other, their 
freedom from petty jealousy, and their warm 
appreciation of each other's work. It was a 
part of their creed, he said, this friendliness. 
All were working together, as missionaries, as 
apostles, to a common end. Under these con- 
ditions mutual support was necessary, and 
jealousy was impossible — and again he in- 
sisted upon the sincerity and the depth of 
purpose which animated their literary move- 
ment and made it also broadly humane. 



VII 



While we talked, a lank dog with a bris- 
tling black coat — a creature of no particular 
breed — jumped up on the wide outer ledge 
of the window and peered in upon us. His 
face had a quizzical cast, and his manner was 
so banterinor that a charo^e of insolence would 



90 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 



have lain against him but for the look of 
good-humored drollery in his eyes. Having 
completed his survey, he jumped down from 
the window-ledge, and a moment later came 
in through the open door to make us his com- 
pliments — with the easy, rather swaggering 
air of an old campaigner whose habit it was 
to pass the time of day with all strangers on 
the chance of a dish of racy talk. 

The genesis of this dog was as eccentric as 
himself He had "come up out of the ground," 
as Mistral expressed it — suddenly appearing 
in the course of one of the poet's country 
walks, and immediately adopting him as a 
master. No one in all the country-side ever 
had seen him, or one like him. But with the 
assurance that was so conspicuous a trait in 
his nature, he had declined to be regarded as 
a stranger. He had made himself entirely at 
home in a moment, and had accepted with 
equanimity the name of Pain-perdu — he 
was no stickler for names, provided rations 
went with them — that was bestowed upon 
him : partly because of his famished condi- 
tion, and partly in memory of the troubadour 
so called. He was a dog of magic, Mistral 
declared, who had started up from nowhere, 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 91 

and who had thrust himself, either for good 
or for evil, into his new master's life. 

But the poet cherished also the fancy that 
the dog — supposing him to be a real dog — 
was a waif from the Wild West Show; which 
aggregation of American talent had passed 
northward from Marseilles to Paris about the 
time that Pain-perdu materialized. Mistral 
has so much the look of Mr. Cody — a resem- 
blance not a little helped by the slouched felt 
hat that he habitually wears — that in Paris 
he has been repeatedly pointed out on the 
streets as "Boofalo"; and he argued that Pain- 
perdu had adopted him for a master because 
of this resemblance. He be^Sfed that I 
would speak to the dog in English; and it 
is a fact that the uncanny creature cocked 
his head at me with a most knowing look, 
and did seem to understand my words. 

An older and more important member of 
the family is Marcabrun, a large grey cat 
of so diofnified a habit that he mio^ht with 
propriety wear ermine, instead of his own 
grey coat, and sit upon the bench. We were 
bidden to observe that he was not a toy cat 
— one of those long-haired, bushy-tailed crea- 
tures to which the Parisians are devoted — 



92 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

but a sturdy, mouse-catching, working cat, 
of honest Egyptian descent; a cat whose con- 
scientious discharge of his duties was honor- 
able to himself and useful to his friends. "I 
have a very sincere affection for cats," said 
Mistral, as he gently stroked Marcabrun's 
jowls. "And I am persuaded," he added 
gravely, " that their knowledge extends to 
many things too subtle for the human mind 
to grasp ! " 

We passed to the salon, where Madame 
Mistral had a tray of liqueurs in readiness 
for the ceremony — which on our side cer- 
tainly had in it much earnestness — of drink- 
ing to each other's health, and to the con- 
tinuance of the friendship that had begun that 
day. And then we touched glasses again in 
honor of the poets and poetry of Provence. 

The day was waning. It was time for us 
to come away. We lingered for a few min- 
utes in the garden, while Madame gathered 
for the Ambassadress a bunch of flowers, to 
which the poet added (running down to the 
hedge to get it) a spray of nerto. It is pre- 
served as a precious relic, this bunch of nerto; 
and though in truth it has become dry and 
yellow, to us it always will seem fragrant and 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 93 

green. Then they came with us to the gate, 
and stood waving farewells after us until a 
turn in the street hid them from our view. 
Here was another case in which ideals had 
stood the test of comparison with realities. 

We drove back by the direct road — 
through Graveson and Rognonas, and so 
across the Durance and on into Avignon. 
Althouo^h a strono: mistral was blowino- — 
with which usually goes a brilliantly clear 
sky — clouds had gathered in the west. Into 
these clouds, beyond the line of liills on the 
farther side of the Rhone, the sun was 
sinking. To the eastward, the distant Alps 
loomed shadowy. In their forefront, tipped 
with red sunlight, towered Mont Ventour — 
as high above the lesser peaks as a great 
poet is above the common level of mankind. 



PART FOURTH 



THAT we should go to the Fountain of 
Vaucluse was a matter of necessity. As 
the ambassadors of a poet we were, in a sense, 
poets ourselves ; and for even a vicarious poet 
to be within a dozen miles of this time-honored 
shrine of poetic love and yet not visit it would 
be a sort of negative sacrilege, an outrage of 
neglect. 

To be sure, as troubadours, we were dis- 
posed to look with but little favor upon the 
chillingly precise verses which the calm Pe- 
trarch addressed to his calm Laura ; to regard 
somewhat disdainfully an ardor so prudently 
iced. But — whether we approved or disap- 
proved of his methods of love-making — the 
fact remained that this Signor Petrarch merited 
some token of outward respect from us, for the 
reason that he belonged to our brotherhood 

95 



96 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

and was one of ourselves. Therefore we de- 
cided that before going to Saint-Remy and to 
Salon we would bear away eastward to the 
Fountain of Vaucluse, and pay his memory a 
passing call. 

La Ponette and the shabby little carriage 
were brought forth from the stables of the 
Hotel de TEurope — -which we were led to 
infer from the hostler's supercilious air had 
been somewhat contaminated by giving shelter 
to our poverty-stricken equipage. On the 
other hand, had the humble Ponette known 
how lordly a price we paid for her subsistence 
in this aristocratic establishment, I am con- 
fident that her short and very thick head 
would have been completely turned. That 
our own heads were a little turned by the 
parallel process in our own case is undeniable. 
For several days after emerging from our 
golden and crimson quarters we maintained 
the fiction that we were ticket-of-leave sover- 
eigns, and made a point of addressing each 
other as "Your Grace." 

Amidst the open smiles of the waiters, 
stable-boys, and other hangers-on of the Hotel 
de I'Europe, we drove forth from the court- 
yard and shaped our course — having a cargo 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 97 

of books to pick up at Roumanllle's shop — 
for the Rue St. Acrricol. All the members of 
the household flocked out to feast their eyes 
upon our car of state drawn by our gallant 
steed. As I close my eyes I can see Rou- 
manille leaning for support against the door- 
jamb, and I can hear the ring of his laugh. 
We had endeavored to prepare him for the 
spectacle ; but he told us frankly, in a voice 
broken with emotion, that what he had re- 
o^arded as efforts of our imaofination had oriven 
him but a feeble notion of the truth. But 
Roumanille w^as forced to admit — as we 
stowed the books in the locker beneath the 
seat, and disposed of the big package of pho- 
tographs between the apron and the dash- 
board — that a good deal was to be said in 
favor of our conveyance on the score of prac- 
tical convenience. What it seemed to lack, he 
said, was style. 

Our parting that day was only temporary. 
We were to come back presently — traveling 
like ordinary mortals in an ordinary railway- 
carriaofe — for a Ion or visit. Therefore we said 
att revoir with good heart, and got under way 
without regret — Roumanille standing out on 
the pavement, still laughing, until the turn 



98 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

into the Cours de la Republique hid him from 
our sight. 

Over our passage down this street, the 
Broadway of Avignon, I draw a veil. It is 
sufficient to say that we attracted more atten- 
tion, a great deal more, than our modesty 
desired. It was with a sigh of relief that we 
passed the city gate, and so came in a few 
minutes into the quiet country road leading 
eastward to L'Isle-sur-Sorgue. -There are 
times in one's life, and this was one of them, 
when the grateful vacancy of the country 
brinors rest and soothino^ to the mind harried 

o o 

by a city's noise and crowd. 

Our way led eastward ; but we actually 
took a route southeastward, that we might 
spend a few hours in the gay company of the 
swiftest and most joyous river in all Europe, 
the Durance. It was a charming road, this, 
that led us through parks and gardens from 
the outer edge of the valley to the riverside. 
Great trees arched over us ; pollard willows 
were ranged along the irrigating canals in 
unending lines ; the soft gurgling sound of 
flowing water filled the air. Now and then 
v/e met or passed a friendly traveler with 
whom we exchanged greetings. From an old 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 99 

Stone gateway, just touched by a sunbeam 
that penetrated the thick foHage above it, a 
Httle girl came out and held up for our admira- 
tion her new doll — a very Sheban of a doll, 
dressed in vivid yellow and girded with a 
scarlet sash. The Ponette jogged along in 
her own slow way, and we did not hurry her. 
Had she known our humor, she would have 
turned it to her private profit by going at 
a walk. 

About noon, swinging away to the north, 
we parted company with the Durance at Bon- 
pas. It is a silk-factory, now, this ancient ab- 
bey — a change fit to make the dust of Simon 
Langham, the Archbishop of Canterbury who 
built the abbey church, compact itself again 
and arise in the shape of a curse. The Bridge- 
building Brothers threw a bridge of stone 
across the river here ; but the river promptly 
threw it off again, and its several successors 
after it. Now, quite in keeping with the silk- 
factory, the stream is spanned by a suspen- 
sion-bridge — the only sort of structure that 
this lio^ht-hearted devil of a river does not 
sooner or later Q-Qt the better of. 

Across the valley, a couple of miles away, 
is Noves, where of old Laura lived. For a 



loo AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

moment we hung in the wind, at the fork of 
the road, while we debated the propriety of 
turning aside to visit her former habitation. 
But Laura is distinctly a second-rate person- 
age. The best that can be said of her is that 
she was the consignee of Petrarch's verses. 
The debate was a short one. 

" We cannot be at the mercy of every whiff 
of Fancy's breeze," said the Ambassador. 

"We must occasionally be firm to our in- 
tentions," said the Ambassadress. 

And, having uttered these resolute words 
of wisdom, we turned our backs upon Noves 
and Laura, and bore away for Thor. We had 
been assured, I may say in passing, that in 
Thor, at the little Hotel de Notre Dame, we 
should get a good breakfast ; had we pos- 
sessed a like assurance in regard to the 
breakfast possibilities of Noves, the case thus 
decided against Laura might have gone 
differently. 



II 



Midway in the village of Thor the highway 
takes a sharp turn ; and just in its bend, so 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE loi 

that the traveler cannot possibly miss it, is 
the hospitably open entrance to the Hotel 
de Notre Dame. A woman nursing a plump 
baby rose to greet us as we drove in, and a 
stern hostler — having the look and manner 
of Prince Bismarck — came forth from the 
stable and took charge of the mare. That we 
might wash away the dust of our journey, we 
were shown to a little box of a bedroom. All 
the floors were of stone ; the steps of the nar- 
row stair were of stone, worn deeply ; and in 
keeping with this fine flavor of antiquity was 
the garnishing of the kitchen fireplace with 
delightful tiles. Excepting the new humanity 
that had come into it, I doubt if there had 
been the smallest chano^e in this whole estab- 
lishment for a round two hundred years. The 
baby was very new indeed, and his )'oung 
mother thought the world of him. She held 
him on one arm durino- most of the time that 
she was engaged in getting breakfast ready, 
but popped him down anywhere — on the table 
or into a basket half filled with potatoes — when 
she required the use of both hands. \\' hen at 
last breakfast was served, he was stowed away 
in a bior cradle in one corner of the dinine- 
room. 



I02 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

Four people breakfasted with us ; but they 
all were shy and taciturn, and only one of 
them — a carter in his shirt-sleeves — looked 
interesting. Had we been alone with the car- 
ter, we should have made friends with him ; 
but he was oppressed, as we were, by the chill 
presence of the other half of our company, 
and devoted his large mouth solely to eating 
and drinking. Yet was he naturally a voluble 
man, and with a fine loud voice : as we 
knew — a moment after he had bolted his last 
mouthful, and had left the table with a jerky 
bow — by hearing him roaring away in ani- 
mated talk with Prince Bismarck outside. 

On the wall of the dining-room was a notice 
stating that the Mayor of Thor had the honor 
to inform the public that the annual market 
of grapes of all qualities would be held in the 
commune, at the accustomed place, on the 
25th of August and the 15th of October, 
proximo. All about the town were vineyards, 
and the crisp aromatic smell of the ripening 
grapes hung heavy in the air. At the little 
cafe, whither we went when our breakfast 
was ended, the old man who served us spoke 
of the vintage with enthusiasm. The vines 
had done well, wonderfully well, he said. A 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 103 

ereat harvest was assured. ''And when our 
grapes are good," he added jolHl)', " we laugh 
and jingle our money in our pockets through 
all the rest of the year." 

He was charmingly talkative, this old man 
— quite unlike the sad company at breakfast 
that had erected a chill barrier of silence be- 
tween the carter and ourselves. My pipe ap- 
pealed to him. ''It is a fine large pipe that 
monsieur smokes," he said cordially. "And 
is it really so light as they say, this German 
clay ? Will monsieur indeed permit me ? . . . 
Mon Dieit, how light ! What a wonder of a 
pipe it is ! " After the severe repression to 
which our natures had been subjected at 
breakfast, coming into the presence of this 
eenial old man was like comino^ forth into 
sunshine from a cold, dark room. 

While the Ponette rested — what she had 
to rest from Heaven only knows ; in all the 
morning she had covered only eight or ten 
miles — we paid our respects to the unknown 
architect who seven hundred years ago built 
the church for which Thor ever since has been 
famed. This duty to art and antiquity being 
discharged, we ascended into our chariot, and 
then the Ponette's scarcely perceptible pro- 



I04 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

gress detached us gently from Thor, and set 
us adrift in the direction of L'Isle-sur-Sorgue. 
From the one town to the other is but a 
step. Even the Ponette could not make 
a journey of it. By mid-afternoon we were 
bowling along the shady main street, beside 
the main channel of the Sorgue, at a spirited 
walk; and so came gallantly to the door of the 
Hotel St. Martin. It is customary for visitors 
to the Fountain of Vaucluse to stop at the 
Hotel de Petrarque-et-Laure ; but in our case 
— apart from our coolness toward those cool 
lovers — there was so much of appositeness in 
finding shelter for ourselves and our beggarly 
equipage at a hotel presided over by St. Mar- 
tin that we did not hesitate for a moment in 
making our choice. 



Ill 



L'IsLE is nothing less than a fascination — 
a tiny Venice, without the bad smells. The 
Sorgue, outflowing from the near-by Fountain 
of Vaucluse, divides above the town into three 
channels, which below it are united again into 
a single stream. Upon the northern island, 
and around about it, the town is built. The 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 105 

main stream, at its widest but a couple of rods 
across, shaded by ancient trees, flows beside 
the highway — which also is the principal 
street of the town. Stone bridges span it here 
and there ; broad flights of stone steps, with 
the look of having escaped from a drop- 
curtain, lead down to its margin and are 
thronged with operatic washerwomen ; huge 
undershot wheels slowly revolve in it (a good 
deal of unpoetic carpet-weaving is done here), 
and suggest melodramatic possibilities of a 
thrillinor and shudderino^ sort — there beinor al- 
ways about a great water-wheel something 
very horrible that sends a chill to one's heart. 
The southern branch flows along the town's 
outskirts ; and the northern, not more than 
six or eight feet wide, runs in a strait channel 
between the houses — and even under them — 
with doors and windows opening upon the 
stream. All day long the cool sound of 
rippling water is in the air ; and its lulling 
tinkle comes soothingly across the soft silence 
of the nio-ht. 

It was the boast of the people of L'Isle 
in former times — before there was thrust 
upon the Fountain of Vaucluse a desecrating 
paper-mill — that they could sit at their ease 
in their houses and fish for trout and eels 



io6 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

through their open doors. Noble traditions 
survive of these dainties, and of a certain 
deHcate variety of crawfish, with which the 
Sorgue did once abound. According to the 
guide-books and the hotel people, the Sorgue 
abounds with them still ; and the represen- 
tative of St. Martin even went so far as to 
assure us that the specimens served for our 
delectation had come from the river to the 
pan with but a single bound. Yet, in point 
of fact, because of that vile paper-mill, the 
fish of the Sorgue are all as dead as Julius 
Caesar. The hotel fish really come from the 
Gardon — clear on the other side of the 
Rhone — and do their bounding in the wake 
of a locomotive by grande vitesse. This 
painful secret was imparted to us by the 
proprietor of the cafe : an intelligent young 
man who had no motive for abetting the local 
fiction, and whose business was of a sort to 
set him a little at odds with the proprietors of 
the hotels. 



IV 



While these facts in reofard to the migrrant 
nature of the fish of L'Isle were being con- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 107 

fided to us — we were taking our after-dinner 
coffee — a man passed by beating loudly upon 
a drum. His untempered music, we found, 
was the announcement of a play to be given 
that very evening in an open-air theater 
down by the water- side in the rear of our 
hotel. The players, said our young man, 
were the wreckage of a strolling company 
that had gone to pieces in L'Isle a month or 
two before ; they gave occasional perform- 
ances to keep themselves alive until some 
happy turn of fortune should enable them to 
get away. 

As we found when we had come to it, this 
open-air theater justified its name. The 
stage was a raised and covered platform, 
with a practicable curtain; but the seats, cut 
off from the rest of the universe by a wooden 
fence, had between them and the sky only 
some chance branches of trees. The best 
seats — two rows of chairs which stood in 
front of the eight or ten lines of benches 
without backs — cost twenty centimes. We 
unhesitatingly paid our eight cents, and took 
places in the front row. 

There were six players, all told, and the 
cast included seven characters. In the first 
act the Villain — quite a desperate villain — 



io8 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

very properly was killed ; but in the second 
act he confused us by reappearing — it was 
the same man in precisely the same cos- 
tume — alive and well. As the play went 
on, however, we discovered that he had ceased 
to be the Villain, and at a stroke had become 
his own uncle and the respectable father of 
the Marchioness. We inferred that there was 
a shortness in the wardrobe as well as in the 
company ; and this probability was empha- 
sized by the references in the lines to the 
somber black in which the Marchioness was 
clad, when, actually, that interesting young 
widow was arrayed in a gown of exceptionally 
bright blue. 

Between the tragedy and the farce the In- 
genue came out among the audience and sup- 
plemented the gate-money by taking up a 
collection in a tin box, her efforts being most 
pointedly directed to squeezing something out 
of the crowd that was massed outside the rail- 
ing and had not paid anything at all. The 
Duena, not cast in the farce, resumed posses- 
sion of her brace of children, who had been in 
the care of friends on the benches, and went 
home with them when the tragedy was at an 
end. We heard her say something about 
breakfast the next day and a pot of tripe. At 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 109 

the end of the performance the Tyrant made 
us all a handsome speech of thanks, and an- 
nounced that on the ensuing Thursday the 
company would have the honor of presenting 
the tragedy of '' Jeanne d'Arc," to be followed 
by a side-splitting farce. I was disposed to 
arise in ni)^ place and to assure the Tyrant 
that for ourselves the obligation was wholly 
on our side. It was a longing of our hearts 
realized — this veritable bit out of '' Le Capi- 
taine Fracasse." 



Before returning to our quarters, we walked 
for a while in the starlight beside the Sorgue : 
seeking to attune our souls by its rippling 
music to the key of poesy fitting to the pil- 
grimage on the ensuing day to the Fountain 
of Vaucluse. In this endeavor we succeeded 
so well that I was beginning to put together 
an apostrophic sonnet to Laura and Petrarch, 
when sleep overtook me and obliterated the 
concluding ten of the necessary fourteen lines. 
And then, at five o'clock in the morning, came 
the proprietor of the Hotel St. Martin, with 
violent knockings, to inform me that the 



no AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

Ponette had developed a severe colic and was 
in a very bad way indeed ! 

For all the remainder of my days the Foun- 
tain of Vaucluse will be associated in my mind 
with the keen internal miseries of that dull 
little mare. Never will I hear a reference to 
Laura and Petrarch without instantly remem- 
bering the unpoetic nature of my frequent 
conferences with the veterinary surgeon, who 
was the better, as I was the worse, on each 
of these occasions by two francs. 

It was the late Lord Verulam who made 
the astute observation (in his essay " Of Sedi- 
tions and Troubles") that "the rebellions of 
the belly are the worst." But even my Lord 
Verulam, who was blessed with a fine vein of 
fancy, never imagined a rebellion of this na- 
ture at so inopportune a time. Instead of 
reveling in a luxury of poetic reminiscence, I 
was forced to dwell upon the prosaic details 
of equine pathology ; while a haunting dread 
beset me of what would happen should the 
sluggish soul of the Ponette separate itself 
from her sluggish body, and so bring me to 
a direful reckoning with Noe Mourgue at 
Nimes ! 

Happily for me, the Ponette was endowed 
with so vigorous a constitution that she did 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE in 

not succumb to her painful disorder. By the 
ensuing morning she practically was well 
again, the veterinary surgeon assured me ; 
and as his interest was wholly against this 
statement, I did not doubt that he spoke the 
truth. But it was with chastened spirits that 
we drove her gingerly to the Fountain of 
Vaucluse ; and our conversation turned not 
upon Laura and Petrarch, but upon the pos- 
sible further internal disturbances of the mare. 
Positively, it made me nervous when she but 
twitched her ears ! 

Yet, in despite of these painful memories 
of the trials and tribulations which befell me 
there, I think of L'Isle-sur-Sorgue only with 
an affectionate tenderness. It possesses a 
beautiful old church, it is renowned for the 
excellence of its dried fruits, and there is in 
its composition a most wonderful mingling 
of sparkling water and sparkling sunshine. 
These merits are considerable ; but its greater 
merit, wherein lies its especial charm for me, 
is its habit of repose. I never have known a 
town where a larger proportion of the towns- 
folk seemed to have so comfortably little to 
do. Their capacity for being negatively 
busy — that is to say, for consciously and de- 
liberately doing nothing : a very different 



112 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

thing from mere idleness^ — is a perfect realiza- 
tion of a beautiful ideal. During the three 
days of our sojourn there some masons were 
making believe to be at work upon repairs to 
the wall of the main canal — close beside an 
old stone bridge whereon was cast by a great 
plane-tree growing beside it a rest-inviting 
shade. All day long relays of the towns- 
people accepted the invitation of the plane- 
tree and sat upon the parapet of the bridge, 
watching with an intelligently languid interest 
the masons keeping up their show of toil. 
Sometimes the members of these self-ap- 
pointed committees fairly went to sleep. But 
it was only by looking closely that their som- 
nolence was apparent — so exquisite, even in 
their widest wakefulness, was their repose. A 
town like that is a bulwark of civilization, 
against which the Huns and Goths of our era, 
whose barbaric war-cry is " Haste!" may strive 
in vain. 



VI 



Salon, where dwelt of old the prophet 
Nostradamus, lies due south of L'Isle at a 
distance of twenty miles. But by going along 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 113 

two sides of a triangle, only thirty miles or so 
out of the direct way, we were able to lay a 
course through Saint-Remy and Les Baux 
that was much more to our minds. Our visit 
to Salon was a matter of diplomatic neces- 
sity — to the end that, as Ambassadors, we 
might wait upon the chief citizen of that town : 
Monsieur Antoine Blaise Crousillat, oldest of 
all the Felibres, to whom his brethren have 
given the affectionate title of dean of their 
poetic guild. 

Early in the morning I held a final confer- 
ence (at the regular two-franc rate) with the 
veterinary surgeon ; received his positive as- 
surance that the revolt in the interior of the 
Ponette was wholly quelled ; and by seven 
o'clock we were on the road. We started at 
this untoward hour partly because we ex- 
pected to drive far that day, and partly be- 
cause the Ponette's physician in ordinary had 
warned us against pushing her at too great a 
speed. Little did this man know about her, 
or never would he have coupled her name 
with so vivacious a word ! His counsel was 
delivered in her presence, and she very obvi- 
ously made a note of it for her own purposes. 
That day she outdid herself in prodigies of 
laziness, and whenever I ventured mildly to 

8 



114 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

remonstrate with her, she would give a warn- 
ing quiver to her fat flanks which thrilled us 
with alarm. She was dull, the Ponette, but 
not stupid— oh, no! 

Although the landscape may be said to 
have clung to our chariot wheels with an af- 
fectionate persistence, we did actually advance. 
By nine o'clock we were in Cavaillon — a 
bowery little town, famous in all this part of 
France for its melons. The elder Dumas made 
a solemn gift of his collected works to the 
municipality of Cavaillon, on the express con- 
dition that every year he should receive a 
tribute of its melons ; which tribute — it was a 
good business transaction for the novelist, for 
in Paris the melons of Cavaillon are fruit of 
price — was paid regularly until the contract 
was liquidated by his death. By ten o'clock 
we had crossed the Durance ; and a little 
before noon we gently edged our way into 
Saint-Remy — when the Ponette, being of a 
gluttonous habit, suddenly snuffed at possi- 
bilities of breakfast, and brought us almost at 
a trot into the remise of the Hotel du Cheval 
Blanc. 

It is a delightful old tavern, this : with 
narrow stairways of stone, crooked passages 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 115 

of various levels laid In tiles, tile-paved cham- 
bers with ancient heavy furniture, the lower 
rooms vaulted, the dining-room fairly extend- 
ing out into the open air under a vine-clad 
arbor, and beyond the arbor an acre or more 
of tano^led orarden in which o^row all too^ether 
fruit-trees and shade-trees and shrubbery and 
vegetables and flowers. A beautiful woman, 
in the beautiful dress of Aries, received us with 
the most cordial of smiles. It was as thoueh 
she had been waitinor Ion or for our comine, 
and was joyful because at last we had arrived. 
And she backed in a practical fashion her dis- 
play of hospitality by giving us a breakfast lit 
for the Lords of Baux. 

Most gentle is the business carried on by 
the people of Saint-Remy: the raising of 
flowers and the sale of their seed. All around 
the town are fields of flowers ; and the flowers 
are suffered to grow to full maturity, and then 
to die their own sweet death, to the end that 
their seed may be garnered and sold abroad. 
Everywhere delicate odors floated about us in 
the air ; and, although our coming was in 
August, bright colors still mingled every- 
where with the green of leaves and grass. 
Insensibly, their gracious manner of earning 



ii6 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

a livelihood has reacted upon the people 
themselves: the folk of Saint -Remy are no- 
table for their gentleness and kindliness even 
among their gentle and kindly fellows of 
Provence. We understood better Roumanille's 
beautiful nature when we thus came to know 
the town of gardens wherein he was born, 
and we also appreciated more keenly the 
verse — in his exquisite little poem to his 
mother — in which he chronicles his birth: 

In a farm-house hidden in the midst of apple-trees, 
On a beautiful morning in harvest-time, 

I was bom to a gardener and a gardener's wife 
In the gardens of Saint -Remy. 

In Saint -Remy was born, and now dwells 
(though we were not so fortunate, on this 
occasion, as to encounter him), still another 
poet : Monsieur Marius Girard, Syndic des 
Felibres de Provence, Felibre majoral, Maitre 
en Gai-savoir, Chevalier of the Order of 
Charles III. of Spain — who especially is the 
laureate of the mountains near which he lives. 
Into his "Lis Aupiho " he has gathered the 
many strange legends of the Alpines, and has 
enhanced the value of his poetry by his 
scholarly researches into the curious history 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 117 

and sociology of this isolated mountain- 
range : and so has won deservedly the crown 
of the floral games at Apt and the olive- 
branch of the Academy of Beziers. And, 
finally, in Saint -Remy lives the present queen 
of the Felibres, Mademoiselle Girard, who 
was chosen to her high office at the sep- 
tennial festival held at Les Baux in August, 
1892. 

But the wonder is not that two poets and 
a queen of poets have been born in Saint- 
Remy, Rather is it that the ordinary speech 
of every one born in this delicately delectable 
little town is not pure iambics ; that there 
should not be poetry in every mouth (as at 
Abdera), ''like the natural notes of some 
sweet melody which drops from it whether it 
will or no." 



VII 



In the early afternoon we went onward, by 
a road that led up a mountain pass into the 
very heart of the Alpines, to Les Baux. A 
red-nosed man crave us the doubtful benefit 
of his company during our exploration of the 



ii8 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

ruined castle and the partly ruined town. It 
was his custom to act as a guide, he said; and 
he seemed to think that this exposition of his 
own habits, without regard to what our habits 
in the matter of guides might be, was amply 
sufficient in the premises. But in his whole 
vinous body there was not an atom of useful- 
ness, either as a guide or as anything else ; 
and his meager soul — injudiciously preserved 
in alcohol — was quite in keeping with its 
useless carnal environment. 

There was no need for a guide. The ruins 
spoke for themselves — a wreck so total, so 
wild, so harsh, that upon it seemed to have 
fallen relentlessly the withering wrath of 
God. The few poverty-stricken souls, quarry- 
men and their ragged families, who found 
shelter in what remained of the houses, 
seemed to be crushed down under the same 
general curse. The red-nosed man officiously 
led us to a sheer cliff, a fall of a hundred feet 
or more, over which a woman but recently 
had cast herself, he said, because she was so 
miserably poor and her life was so bitter and 
so hard. Beholding the dreary ruins amidst 
which this sorrowful creature's home had 
been, and hearing told with a rasping minute- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 119 

ness the details of her broken-hearted Hfe, we 
did not wonder that in a crisis of heroic 
cowardice she had leaped out from the dark 
certainties of that heio-ht and of Time toee- 
ther into the luringly bright uncertainties of 
Eternity. 

It added to the desolateness of the wreck of 
castle and town that this red-nosed abomina- 
tion should be, as he seemed to be, the most 
prominent citizen of the ruin of all over which 
the Lords of Baux had reigned — glorying in 
their descent in a right line from the young- 
est and the bravest of the Macri ; bearing for 
their device the sixteen-rayed star of Beth- 
lehem ; and upholding valiantly through the 
centuries their war-cry: " Au hazard, Bal- 
thazar ! " 

Even on that mountain height the clay was 
wanino;" when at last we turned to ofo. We 

o o 

came back to the wretched inn, and there 
waited until the boy into whose charge I had 
given the Ponette should harness her again. 
It was an unwise consideration for the comfort 
of the Ponette that had led me to order the 
harness taken off — as I perceived when that 
utterly incompetent boy attempted to replace it. 
Even the stolid little mare seemed to smile at 



I20 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

him as she turned her head and contemplated 
his misdoings ; and the quarrymen, standing 
about the doors of the buvette and the worse 
for their evening drams, openly laughed. 
The red-nosed man officiously tried to help, 
and only got the harness more tangled. In 
the end, I had to shove them both aside and 
do the harnessing myself — with an inward 
prayer that I might do it well enough to hold 
together until we got back to Saint -Remy. 

We went down the mountain road at a 
good trot, with the brakes set hard. The 
road was as smooth as French roads — bar- 
ring chemms d' exploitation — always are, and 
the descent was sharp : even the Ponette 
could not refuse to trot with the carriage 
fairly pushing her along. Dusk was falling 
on the heights, and darkness had come by 
the time that we reached the plain. From the 
unseen fields of flowers sweet scents were 
borne to us ; sweetest of all being the richly 
delicate odor from a field of heliotrope close 
beside us, but hidden in the bosom of the 
night. 

Our dinner at the Cheval Blanc was served 
to us at a small table in the arbor — lighted 
by lamps hung from the lattice — close beside 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 121 

the vine-covered archway that opened upon 
the dark garden beyond. At another small 
table three elderly men were dining-, who 
bowed to us gravely as we took our seats, 
but who were sufficiently remote from us to 
make an attempt at general conversation 
unnecessary. To one of them — a pleasant- 
looking old boy, with a mahogany face that 
testifieci to an outdoor habit of life and to a 
liking for honest red wine — we evidently 
were objects of interest. We caught him 
shooting sidelong looks at us, and he evi- 
dently was keeping his ears wade open to our 
English talk. They finished their dinner 
before we had finished ours, and again we 
interchanged bows as they rose to leave. But 
our mahogany-faced gentleman was not quite 
done with us. In the doorway he paused for 
a moment, as though steadying himself for 
some venturesome deed. Then, with another 
bow, he said wuth a sharp abruptness: "Good 
night " — and instantly disappeared ! 

It was most startling to have this scrap of 
English fired at us, at point-blank range, with 
the unexpectedness of a thunderbolt out of a 
clear sky. Obviously, however, the effect of 
his deliverance w^as most severe upon him- 



122 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

self — the recoil incident to his lingual ex- 
plosion carrying him clear out of our sight. 
Doubtless his digestion that night was the 
worse for his violent tampering with a foreign 
tongue. And did we, in that single lurid 
gleam of speech, get the benefit of his entire 
English vocabulary ? We never knew ! 

Bearing in her hands our two candles, our 
beautiful hostess piloted us to our bed-cham- 
ber — up the narrow worn stone stairway, 
along the narrow crooked passages broken by 
incidental flights of steps, and so to the large 
tile-paved room whereof the mahogany furni- 
ture had grown black with age, and where 
everything was exquisitely clean. The bed- 
linen had a faint smell of lavender, and the 
beds were comfortable to a degree. As I 
sank away into sleep I was aware of the 
delicate, delicious odor of flowers swept in 
through the open window by the soft night 
wind. 



VIII 



All Saint -Remy was astir — 't was the 
Feast of the Assumption — as we left it the 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 123 

next day. The shady Place d'Armes was 
crowded with men in blouses, who ate melons, 
and smoked short pipes, and all the while 
talked so vigorously that there was a buzzing 
in the air as though of bees. The women — 
beautiful with a stately beauty, and wearing 
the beautiful dress of Aries — were clustered 
in front of the church, wherein they attended 
to their religious duties in relays, and added 
to the buzzing a sharper note with the simul- 
taneous going of all their tongues. Every 
moment the two gatherings were enlarged by 
new recruits come in from the outlying farms: 
affluent country-folk in high two-wheeled 
carts drawn by round little horses of the 
Camargue, or less affluent country-folk who 
came joyfully to the feast on the two legs 
which God had ofiven them. 

Only our strong sense of duty as Ambassa- 
dors enabled us to fetch away from Saint- 
Remy and the glad company assembled there 
and to Q-Q onward to Salon. As we drove off 
through the flower-fields, and then through 
vineyards and olive- orchards and plantations 
of almond trees, the feast still was present 
with us in the persons of those whom we met 
going to it, all gallant in their feast-day 



124 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

clothes. Toward the end of our journey we 
met other hoHday folk returning from Salon ; 
and then our hearts were comforted for the 
loss of Saint -Remy by our delight in this 
bravely castellated little city set sturdily upon 
its hill. 

Our credentials to the dean of the Felibres 
were as slight as ever an embassy carried. 
" He lives beside the fountain," said Rouma- 
nille. "Tell him that you come from me." 
That was all ! But we knew that it was suffi- 
cient. Doubts as to our calling we never had 
entertained ; and the welcome that had been 
given us at Avignon had convinced us that 
our election was altogether sure. 

We had ample time to present ourselves to 
Monsieur Crousillat before dinner — it was 
but half after five when our establishment at 
the very comfortable Hotel des Negociants 
was completed, and the days still were long. 
When we asked for information in regard 
to the whereabouts of Monsieur Crousillat's 
home, 'Toinette, the daughter of the house — 
plump as a little partridge and beaming with 
smiles — instantly offered to be our guide. 
" It is but a step," she said. " You turn the 
corner and you are upon the boulevard — in a 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 125 

moment you come to the fountain and the 
Place d'Aubes. But were it a o-reat deal 
farther," she added earnestly, '' I should have 
the most of pleasure in showing m'sieu'- 
madame the way." She was the kindest- 
hearted little creature in the world, this eood 
'Toinette. The next day she went with us to 
the church in which Nostradamus lies bur- 
ied, where we encountered a crusty sacristan 
whose stock of merchantable civility was sold 
in small portions at the rate of hft)' centimes 
each. The rate struck me as low; but 'Toi- 
nette, witnessing the purchase of that which 
by her creed should be given freely, was 
sincerely shocked. ''To think," she said, 
"of being paid for politeness! That is not 
the way in our town." And presently she 
repeated : " No, that Is not the way in our 
town at all ! " 

'Toinette's courtesy was as delicately dis- 
criminating- as it was cordial. When she had 
led us nearly to Monsieur Crousillat's door 
she left us — "because m'sieu'-madame doubt- 
less wish to make this visit alone," she said. 
She could not have exhibited a nicer con- 
sideration had she been the very finest lady 
In the land. 



126 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

We knocked at the door of the poet's 
house, but there was no reply ; nor was 
there when we knocked again. Our third 
knock brought out from a shoe-shop in the 
adjoining house a pleasant-faced young girl, 
who informed us that no one was at home 
just then, and advised us to return at six 
o'clock — when we would be sure to find 
some one, because that was the hour at 
which the family supped. It was with the 
utmost good-heartedness that she spoke, 
and with the air of one to whom the suc- 
cess of our visit was a matter of serious 
concern. 

There is not anywhere a more delightful 
town than Salon in which to ramble in the 
quiet time of sunset. All the center of it — 
the part lying about the castle, within what 
were the limits of the ancient walls — is a 
tangle of narrow crooked streets, which give 
fresh combinations of picturesqueness at every 
turn ; outside of this tightly compressed area, 
occupying the site of walls and moat, is a 
broad boulevard shaded by double lines of 
trees ; and beyond the boulevard are houses 
set more openly, between which are far views 
out over the vast level of the Crau, or across 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 127 

vineyards and olive-orchards to the distant 
hills. 

So charminof was it all that the hour was 
nearer half after six than six when we re- 
turned to Monsieur Crousillat's door. The 
pleasant-faced young girl was on the look- 
out for us, and with her was her pleasant- 
faced mother. The mother begged that we 
would not knock — "because M'sieu' An- 
toine is at his supper, and it is not well, as 
madame no doubt knows, to interrupt old 
people at their meals." And then she added 
with a frank friendliness: "Perhaps ma- 
dame and m'sieu' will have the goodness to 
seat themselves in my shop and wait for just 
a very little while ; it certainly will not be 
long." 

They made us as welcome as though we 
had been old friends, yet kept in view the fact 
that we were distinguished strangers, and 
preened their feathers — while cooing per- 
functory dissent — as our magnificences were 
pleased to express an obviously sincere ad- 
miration for their town. Then a neighbor 
dropped in, and took a lively part in our dish 
of friendly talk ; and so, for half an hour, we 
all chatted away together as comfortably as 



128 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

though we had known one another through 
the whole of our respective Hves. 



IX 



When, at last, we despatched the young girl 
upon a reconnoissance, Monsieur Crousillat 
returned with her — in a fine state of perturba- 
tion because we had been kept waiting for so 
long a while. He was a most sprightly old 
gentleman, with a fresh complexion decidedly 
at odds with his full white beard, and carried 
jauntily his fi ve-and- seventy years. In his 
eagerness to make amends for our waiting, he 
scarce gave us time to say good night to our 
obliging friends of the shoe-shop : in a mo- 
ment we were whisked out of it and into his 
own home. And his cordiality was of a sort 
that manifested itself in deeds as well as in 
words : with what an amiable energy did he 
lead us first to the house of Nostradamus, 
and thereafter about the town, expound- 
ing to us its history and its traditions, on 
the ensuing day ! 

Just within the doorway his sister was wait- 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 129 

ing to welcome us — a gracious little white- 
haired lady, with a lively yet gentle manner, 
and with the freshness of youth still lingering 
upon her sweet old face. With her was their 
elder brother, to whom we were presented 
with a certain amount of ceremony : a vigor- 
ous young gentleman of eighty-five. There 
was a becoming touch of gravity in his man- 
ner ; but this seemed to be due to his respon- 
sible position as head of the family rather than 
to his years. It was the most charmingly 
quaint household that can be imagined — 
where the perpetual youth of sweet and gen- 
tle natures had held a gallant guard upon the 
threshold against the assaults of age. The 
most delicate touches of all were shown in the 
affectionate deference of the cadet and the 
young sister toward the head of their house ; 
and in the loving pride with which the poet 
was regarded by his kinsfolk — this poet who 
was their very own, united to them by the 
closest ties of blood, yet who was on terms 
with the Muses and had won for himself the 
recognized right to fetch honey freely from 
Hymettus Hill. 

The poetry of Monsieur Crousillat is graver 
in tone than is that of the majority of his fel- 



I30 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

low Felibres. In the preface to his collection 
of " Noels" — which work he did the Ambas- 
sadress the honor to present to her — he has 
written : " The main object of all poets being 
to instruct as well as to please, I have, from 
love of truth, though not forgetting that poe- 
try is tinged with fiction, imposed upon my- 
self the duty of avoiding a little what is legend 
alone and what belongs entirely to theology. 
And I have endeavored within the limits of 
my power to make each of my noels teach, 
as fables teach, a moral lesson." Yet is there 
a strain of exceeding tenderness in his grave 
verse, and a naive simplicity which gives it a 
touching and peculiar charm. 

He is a master of many tongues, this oldest 
of the poets of Provence : uniting with the 
two languages which are his birthright a 
knowledge of Italian, gained in the course of 
an enchanting journey into Italy in the time 
of his youth ; an elegant Latinity, that finds 
expression in highly finished verse ; and a 
reading command of English. Two English 
poets are especially dear to him : Milton and 
Dryden. With the first of these his own ut- 
terances, though less grandiose and more 
humane, have something in common ; and it 



AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 131 

is easy to perceive how the verse of Dryden — 
flowing, melodious, sonorous — commends it- 
self to one whose own rich language especially 
is suited to the composition of poetry in which 
precisely these qualities are found. 

For the lack of opportunity to train his ear 
to its sound, Monsieur Crousillat could not 
understand spoken English ; nor did he ven- 
ture to speak it. He could write it, he said ; 
and even had carried on an English corre- 
spondence with a cousin living in our own 
country, in Philadelphia — the daughter of a 
refugee from France in '89. Once she had 
come to Salon, this kinswoman, and had paid 
them a visit. But that, he added slowly, was 
a long, long while ago — nearly half a cen- 
tury. After her return to America their 
letters had sped back and forth briskly for a 
time ; but as they had grown old the letter- 
Avriting had languished ; and at last it had 
ended — when she died. 

There seemed to me to be a suQfOfestion of 
the delicate perfume of ashes-of-roses about 
this episode of the American correspondence 
that had withered and perished so long ago. 
Later, I discovered that this was a case in 
which my fancy had led me astray ; yet am 



132 AN EMBASSY TO PROVENCE 

I entirely confident that the, welcome given 
by the dean of the Felibres to the Embassy 
was the warmer because America was the 
country whence it came. 

With this visit of respect to Monsieur 
Crousillat — that changed, without our taking 
thought about it, into a visit of affection — the 
stately formalities of our mission were at an 
end. As an Embassy we had presented our- 
selves to the Capoulie, and to the Senior 
Poet, of the Felibrige ; our credentials had 
been approved by these high functionaries, 
and ourselves had been accepted as personce 
gratce. For the remainder of our stay near 
the Court of this Poetic Power we were en- 
titled, as recognized Ambassadors, to receive 
from all its subjects — and, verily, we did 
receive — that cordial consideration which in 
such cases the comity of nations prescribes. 



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